Last entry, we saw..ants blamed for the low fertilisation rate in the pumpkins, necessitating manual fertilisation..dusting the female flower bits with the..male flower bits!

Naow, these ants.

Blessed things are everywhere eh.

In Jobs Palace in Beacon, in WA, on the rabbitproof fence, edge of station country,  I managed to keep them out of the kitchen..spraying.

They kept on intruding, so the next step was..find out how they got in, ..more spray.

In through the wall, so we sprayed where they got in, ..consequence..they found another entry point…but they had a line of ants back to..getting in through the fence..well, low super six type fence all the way around the house. Two or three gates, and a few cracks in the sheeting were much easier to manage than..50 or so metres of house wall.

So, the ants got banned from the house block.  Worked quite well..I siliconed up the cracks, laid long lasting spray  across the gates..and when they got a tad too persistant, we dosed up the trail to their nest. Oh, and sealed up any food in the house and pantry..

These blighters were small and fast moving antikins..didnt take them long to develop a huge presence through a newly discovered crack in the defences…

The big and slow buggers I left alone..unless they found sugar or whatnot inside the house.  Out on a mates house, 14 k north of Beacon, there were bigger buggers.  They’d traipse inside, mosy around, and scarper outside..mostly. On occasion, though, they annoyed the hell out of me, and the next time it rained, they had payback happening bigtime. Lots of rain, over a short time, made for sheets of water heading on down the block.  Some of this was ..diverted, lets say, lots of earthworks do that, and it was a joy to see lots and lots of..ants and eggs disappeariing down my little creek that I had fashioned. These were what we call meat ants, reddy brown, up to an inch long, and feisty little sods. They were very socially minded..darn things didnt have one nest by itself, oh no, they have to invite all the neighbours along too.  Consequence..nice sunny spot, a tad sheltered, and home to dozens and dozens of ant holes, and myriads of them.  Not something to blunder into, they give short shrift to interlopers…they and I developed an uneasy armistice. Now, these werent the biggest ants around, there was a slow black variety, they were fine, never a bother, inch and bigger, and not feisty at all.

But I digress.

Ants inside the house are a no no.  Even the most ardent of ant admirers draws the line at a trail of ants covering the food of the moment in the pantry.  Sacrosanct territory.  Of course, having come from the outback of WA, its second nature to seal all the foodstuffs, and give them some incentive to Not coming inside apart from genocide, which is by far the preferred option, or perhaps antocide is more apt.

In the house we had in Cleveland, they werent a real hassel, except they had a racetrack up into the roof..which was To Be Discouraged hey.  Regular dosing helped Stem the Flow…there were some really tiny ants..not Argentine ones, but still a nuisance..they had a habit of finding a single crumb, and rallying the troops around to Cart the Whole Darn Thing back to the nest.  They were in the walls somewhere..were not a bother unless a Somebody left a mess. They only had a couple of access points, which made it all pretty easy.

Now, these Alexandra Hills Version.

Persistant as all getout. anything that doesnt move for a day or so is liable to get colonised.  sigh..potplants. buckets, Epiphytes on trees..there were a crowd of yellow bum ants that werent aggressive, and were quite likeable..for ants..they colonised the epiphyte outside on the stump of a palm tree we had had chopped down..(Cleveland) and the Epiphyte seemed to thrive with them..all against the stump was bits that these ants had put there to repel invaders. Only see the occasional yellowbum ant here. These other blighters, fair little sods. At least they don’t get into the house eh.

There is another version of ant here..green tree ant is what ..they are called, only they are black as the ace of spades, and inclined to be feisty. Up to an inch long, mix quite happily with the ..persistant sods..and inclined to be a bit on the slow side .We get swarms of them happening, again not inside the house, iiincined towards being a nuisance..Apon our arrival, they had colonised the whole back lawn, and there were people getting bitten and stung left right and centre… They seemed to learn from the attention they got, and now mostly leave the lawn alone. Of course, we now have pumpkins bigtime on the back lawn, it remains to be seen what will happen when the pumpkins get consigned to the scrap heap..