ANTS!!! Or, In Praise of Terro

We have bugs in our house.

We live in the tropics, and there's not much you can do about bugs other than declare chemical warfare on them. Sometimes the bugs wins, sometimes the humans win. Visits by cockroaches are relatively rare, thanks to Mr. Catangui.

Ants, however, are another story. The rainy season has apparently driven them inside, as we've recently been overrun by them without a corresponding slide into slovenliness. Nothing we've found here has been able to control them, so I asked Mom to send us a bottle of Terro, the best ant killer I've ever used (and which she's kindly sent to me on Guam and in Japan, where it's worked equally as well as it does back home).

Within minutes of putting a few drops of Terro in strategic locations, we had hundreds of ants coming out of hiding to chow down. (Though they look like some sort of tropical mega-ants, that's just Shelly's macro lens making them look impressive. The drop of poison is about the size of a pencil eraser.) Terro says it works by not immediately killing the ants, but letting them live long enough to take it home and poison the rest of the colony. It apparently works, as several days into their extermination, we're once again ant-free.

Or at least nearly ant-free. We do live in the tropics, after all.