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Sunday, April 4, 2010

Ant Nest in the Bamboo Chicks

I have some bamboo chicks that can be let down to block out sun... no, no... they're not little hens. They're bamboo screens that can be rolled up and down at my whim and fancy.

The thing though, is that they're really heavy... and with the row of living bamboo so effectively screening out heat and glare, the bamboo chicks aren't ever brought down at all.

Every 6 months a thriving ant colony will nest in the rolls of bamboo sending out thousands of industrious ant scouts throughout my garden. It's a veritable Mayan or Aztec civilisation at its height!! The ants fan out and cultivate aphids, soil mealies and mealybugs on my plants. They harvest sweet aphid dew and prosper. Oh... do they prosper.

Every 6 months, I roll down those bamboo chicks and spray jets of hot steam at the moving masses of insect bodies rushing to shield the ant babies from harm. It's amazing, the ants will go straight for the babies to try and carry them to safety. Ruthless and with my face implacable, I set my mouth in a tight thin line and handle my steam cleaner nozzle like Petunia Rambo with her bazooka.

It's a messy business. I decided to do it with more finesse this time though... A quiet and discreet assassination using dried dog food soaked in a borax solution. I found a tiny vial of borax in Little Boy's chemistry set and thought to experiment a bit.

It gave me a bit of a scare though because Milo ate the first soaked block. Luckily, it was a very small piece with very little borax and my dog is still alive. Phew! I kept the next wet block far from him. I crushed the soaked (very smelly) dog food into bits and placed it along the ant trail. The ants are now swarming all over the bits.

I will wait a few days and then I will roll down the bamboo chicks to see if the home-made ant poison has worked. Mwahahahahahaha!

2 comments:

aaronie said...
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Petunia Lee said...
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