Rome could have been built in a day

Despite hating the little bastards, I am somewhat impressed by ants right now.

I left my house on Wednesday morning with no trace of anything wrong. I returned on Wednesday night to find a million+ little black ants launching a takeover of my kitchen. I've never even seen one ant in my house in the entire 3 months we've lived there, and on Wednesday night they were pouring out of a crack in the wall near the downstairs toilet, marching over to the bin, and then around it on to the kitchen wall, behind the fridge, coming out the other side and marching into the pantry, with a separate contigent making their way from the bin, across the floor and up the cupboards on to the bench, forming little pools of ants under the lip of the counter top.

I have never seen so many ants in my whole life. This was not a usual ant line of a few hundred ants walking in single file. They were 5 deep, and forming little turnpikes of about 200 ants to serve as way gates or something. It was the oddest thing I've ever seen. Poor Alex was terrified of them and kept going up to one of the pools of them and sniffing and then backing away.

It took 3 hours to get rid of them. I didn't want to spray them straight up, because that would have been a lot of spray, there were so many of them. I started vacuuming the lines up, but they kept pouring out of the crack in the wall, and out of the pantry on their way back to the nest.

I had to empty the entire pantry out. At this stage, I must say I am eternally grateful to Tupperware for making airtight (and ant-tight, it would seem) containers. They hadn't managed to get into my dry goods, but did seem particularly fond of the caster sugar container - there were hundreds huddled under the rim, eating the few sugar crumbs that were there.

There were thousands of ants in the pantry. I had to take everything out, vacuum the shelves, spray around the perimeter and then clean them of dead ants before vacuuming the containers to rid them of ants and putting everything back in. We'd run out of spray and couldn't control the assault of back up forces coming from the crack in the wall. I had to leave the vacuum cleaner nozzle shoved up to the wall while William went to the shops for more supplies, sucking them in every time one dared come out of the hole. The funniest thing was seeing a new wave of forces pour out of the hole every time I took the vacuum cleaner away to clean the pantry. They were in there waiting for their chance to strike!

The source of their excitement was found on the jar shelf. There were three times as many ants there as the other shelves. We pulled out half the jars and cans before we found the source. Honey. They were all over it. Iron Bark honey, incidentally. There were hundreds of ants on the jar, and they seemed to have found a way in, or at least were packing themselves under the lid somehow, because every time we thought we'd vacuumed the ants up, more would come pouring down the sides. We ended up just throwing it in the outside bin.

They won that battle, but we won the war.

3 hours later, 12 ant baits, 2 cans of spray and a vacuum bag full of casualties, we'd finally beaten them.

The little bastards had built an empire in 10 hours. If humans were that productive, we'd have conquered the universe B.C.