Something curious happened the other night. Well curious things usually happen anyways when you're on acid. Acid is a great method to occasionally give the old blinders a good wipe down, so to speak. You sort of temporarily wipe out those conceptual heuristics and compression valves that characterize the human experience, and you see things as they are through your visual systems very vividly.
Of course taking acid feels a bit like cheating. You're supposed to use spiritual discipline to eventually get to this point, which produces a more stable mode of observation, and for many the psychedelic experience is a bit overwhelming and you don't get to learn as much as you should, or you just have fun with all the pretty colors and want to take more and more the next time and it can actually alter your brain chemistry permanently if you blow yourself out, so I've heard.
But anyways, this psychedelic session happened to coincide with a particularly nasty infestation of ants. There were a lot of people coming in and out of the house and someone kept cooking with honey, and essentially leaving the jar a dripping mess when it was put back up in the pantry.
Of course I was beginning to peak and I had to use the restroom, and was struck with horror as I surveyed the state of the kitchen. The ants were literally everywhere (this wasn't exaggerated by the psychedelics); they had taken over many surfaces of the kitchen, and a vast majority of them were entering through a crack in the bathroom, where they would congregate on the bathroom floor before streaming up the side of the pantry. Someone had placed a rug next to their main trail so people could step over it and just use the restroom and leave, perhaps in the hope that the ants would just leave.
It turns out that ants love honey. Well, of course. The central attraction was a pool of spilled honey in the pantry that they were swarming, proceeding to surround it and lap at its edges. They'd go back and forth to drink honey and then congregate down on the bathroom floor with what looked like a party, before returning to the bathroom crack.
This was a learning event that took a contrast of extremes. Usually we have to deal with the occasional break-out of these common brown ants - oftentimes in the summer - and we are taught to, you know, swipe em into the sink with a sponge or spray a bunch of Raid or whatnot.
All of these things horrified me, but there was always someone else who wanted to take care of it. No I guess you can't just let the ants do their thing and leave, so the story goes, or they will slowly take over and be a constant presence. The common middle class suburbanite sensibility is that of biophobia and the constant fear of any sort of expression of nature within the house without a human genesis, and the creeping suspicion that an unauthorized expression of nature will soon become total and all-consuming without an intervention.
Here I was living in a house in which the biophobia was less pronounced, and of course no one wanted to kill all these ants, but someone had to do something, as the infestation was extreme. It was too painful for me to simply wipe the ants away, so I had to try a few things first.
Immediately noticeable was the fact that the ants seemed primarily interested in the honey. The major point of congregation was the puddle in the pantry, while there were a few parties around various drips on the floor, and then scattered groups scouring the kitchen, and scouts in the furthest areas. However the ants didn't seem to be interested in much else.
Well I eventually found that if you blew air on the ants congregating around the honey puddle, they would sense something was wrong, and they would turn away from the honey and run wildly around the pantry shelf. If you kept blowing, you could literally see the great mass of them continue back down their pheromone trail, and you could see the signal pass: a wave would move down the line and the ants coming up the shelf would turn with the rest coming down and the entire direction of the flow would reverse in an orderly line.
This was the majority of the population. There was a minority which actually stuck around the honey puddle, braving whatever threat there was to continue to get intoxicated or what have you. And there was something else: the ant flow would oscillate. It would flee from the sudden wind kicking up, and then after a few seconds, the flow would move back up the line and the ants would return to see whether the threat remained, and whether the honey puddle was still viable. I had to keep blowing to keep the flow on the wane, and I would clean the puddle of honey little by little as the ants cleared out until there was nothing left. I also used this method to clean the drops across the floor.
Over time, miraculously, the ant infestation thinned out substantially. There was no honey left, and the ants had better places to be and better things to do with their time. Turns out that they weren't a relentless menace that sought conquest of the house. The next morning there would be virtually no ants left in the house, save a few stragglers, and a few junkies making sure there wasn't any honey left. Now different ants facing different conditions in different regions may have behaved very differently, and then considerations have to be made for dangerous species.
It also depends on what the ants are after. They are known for destroying certain food supplies, but if you remove the supply quick enough and have the rest thoroughly sealed, it seems you can get rid of them without violence.
There are some things to take away from this episode, which I will get to next.
