Author: Donald Guenther
Uploaded: 10/25/2013
Is it learn from the ants or live with the ants?
It happened early in July every year. Mom would see them and tell the story of how we came to share our house with these little monsters, carpenter ants. We lived with the ants.
When older brother Ronny was in high school biology his project had been to study ants. The year was 1952, the year I was born. With Mom pregnant and not too attentive of Ronny’s deeds, he took some gallon jar milk bottles, filled them with dirt and went out and captured a colony of carpenter ants. Ronny proudly stated that he knew how to recognize and catch the queen ants. To keep the ants in the jars he circled the inside of the bottle neck with butter. The ants couldn’t get out because they couldn’t cross the butter. Ronny kept the ants in the house’s enlarged crawl space area, previously the pantry. He favored the larger carpenter ants. Ronny studied the ants and over time went on to bigger and better projects. Ronny wasn’t one to worry about water over the dam.
The butter on the jar lips dissolved in the summer heat and the ants escaped. Ronny didn’t worry as he was sure the ants would return to the wild. The ants had other ideas. They made the warm house a permanent residence, they had moved into our home. Carpenter ants burrow into wood and are devastating to wood structures. The ants settled in the house foundations and walls.
The ant colony grew into the thousands and once a year at the prescribed time they would take flight, sending out queens and colonies. The first year of flying ants was 1954. In two short years Ronny’s ant farm had grown extremely large, multiplying itself many times over. We had never heard of extermination in those days and learned to live with the ants.
As one of the little kids, I had heard the story many times. My brothers and I loved to catch ants in jars like Ronny. One time we caught a whole colony of carpenter ants and put them on an island in a wash tub underneath the house, just where we had heard that Ronny had started his ant farm. We figured we would learn from Ronny’s mistake and so we devised a full proof method of keeping the ants from straying; we put a water mote in the tub surrounding the little island. We waited a few days for them to nest and then caught a bunch of red fighting ants and dumped the red ants onto the island. A war ensued between the little, but more aggressive, red ants and the carpenter ants. We watched. The red ants would bite the larger carpenter ant’s legs and hang on. The carpenter ants would respond by disembodying the red ants, but the biting heads of the red ants would stay affixed to the black ants. Where Ronny studied ant culture we studied ant warfare. Boys.
We grew tired of observing the warfare, and forgetting our little project, the water dried up and leaked out. We didn’t notice as our ants joined Ronny’s ants to live in the house. Ronny’s disaster became our disaster. His miserable failure had become our own.
On a hot summer day the ants streamed out of cracks and holes of the house in countless numbers. A can of raid could be fired continuously at the hoard and not make a dent.
Over time the foundation of the house began to give way. Dad, not being a big believer in concrete blocks, blocked up the house with wood. The house foundation now consisted of wood blocks. Most people know that wood rots and it also attracts every ant in the neighborhood, but Dad had many shortcuts in his fix-it methods. As could be predicted, the ants didn’t leave for the wilds and soon took after the tasty new wood blocks. Dad responded by using treated telephone post sections to keep the house up. The aunts met their match and retreated to the walls. The takeover of the ants was complete. History repeats itself, does it not?
Postscript:
The house was torn down in 1972. The ants had the run of the house for 20 years. The demolition crew took a large cable and wrapped the house. The ends of the cable were attached to a large cat. The cat moved away from the house and the crew watched, expecting the house to collapse. The cable went right under the house and the house stood without collapsing. Now, how could that be? You don’t suppose those ants had something to do with that, do you?
Ronny’s disclaimer, 2016:
Actually, I always got a bad rap on that story. It is true that that is the way pop told it. Here is what happened. I did go out and capture the ants and I did make sure that I got the queen ants. I had two colonies, not just one, one colony was of those red ants and the other of those giant sized black ants. I knew they would fight each other and so I got two galvanized wash tubs, made a great place for the ants, each in two separate colonies. We had once used those galvanized washtubs for taking a bath in when we first moved out and later mom had used them in her washing, but they were pretty much shot but the time I went into the ant business. So, I did put a ring around the washtubs with butter so they wouldn’t get out, and was all set to do my studies on the ants. Well, believe it or not, in only a couple of days, the butter melted and those ants abandoned the galvanized washtubs that had good dirt and wood in it, plenty of food and so on. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Simultaneously with the outward migration of the ants, though, termites had set in. Those were not my business and those were the flying ants. They were not really ants, they were flying termites. Now ants and termites are bitter enemies so I figured they would eat each other up. As it turned out, they didn’t. There was room for all. Basically, the rest of the story is right, though. The house was built on wooden blocks, not cement blocks. There was always trouble brining the water down from the creek but rubber inner tube plumbing handled that. That house just did not want to go down either, but I maintain, but nobody ever believed me, that is was the termites that did the house in. Those ants were defending the place. It was lucky that I brought those ants in or the house would have been gobbled up long before it was time for it to come down. In fact, the termites were so voracious, that if you placed a marble anywhere on the floor, the marble would roll. Scientifically speaking, the floor was no longer a two dimensional inertial frame. That state along should free me of all blame.