Proverbs 6:6

Last week, I came in Tuesday morning after the 3-day weekend to find ants crawling along the window sill in my office. Investigation established that on the window sill, I had left a travel mug with just enough tea to cover the bottom of the mug. They were indeed attracted to the mug and there were a number of ants crawling up and in the mug. However, most of the ants appeared to be coming in under one end of the window, crawling around my clock/radio, along the front edge of the sill, past an index card, past a second empty travel mug, past a roll of packing tape, back toward the window around an empty coffee cup, and out the other side of the window....and there was a corresponding stream of returning ants. I removed the mug with the tea, but since it didn't appear that they were interested in anything else, I left everything else there. I sent an e-mail off to maintenance to inform them of the ant problem.

I watched with interest as the path of the ants varied through the week, though the only abrupt change was when I moved the empty coffee cup and a greeting card dropped down directly on the ants path. Within the hour, they'd established a new path around the card.

On Friday, maintenance responded to my e-mail that the work was completed. I responded that I still had a healthy stream of ants crawling along my window sill.

This morning, the ants continued along my window sill. They were much fewer than they had been the previous week, but I attributed that to the cooler, rainy weather. I also noted that the changes in their march had them traversing a more sheltered path. They now came from around the radio, under the raised edge of the index card, around the base of the empty mug, around the edge of the packing tape, and close to the window edge of the sill past the greeting card and empty coffee cup.

This evening, the pest-killer man found my office. "Do you have an ant problem?"

A quick glance at my sill confirmed that the ants were still at home. "Yes."

"Ah-hah. I got the rest of the building but missed the library." (I guess that was last week. Does he find libraries uninteresting and assume ants would be just as uninterested in libraries??)

He went to work. He moved the coffee mug, greeting card, packing tape, travel mug, index card, and picked up the radio. As soon as he picked up the radio, ants were swarming everywhere--they immediately covered the radio, were falling to the floor, and were crawling all over that end of the sill and adjacent wall!

Startled, he dropped the radio back on the sill. He began to shake off the ants that had crawled onto his hand, "Did you want to keep this radio?"

Split-second assessment. It was a radio I'd picked up at a garage sale in my college days. Getting the ants out of that.... "No."

"Are you sure you don't want to keep the radio?" as he began to spray the ants that had fallen along the baseboard and worked on clearing the surrounding area.

I was already reaching for the plug under my desk, "No, it's not worth keeping."

He moved the radio by the cord to the trash can, but ants were already beginning to cover the cord, so it was only a relatively better place to grab. The ants had indeed been nesting under/in the radio. Where the radio had been, there remained more than just ants--there was some sort of white-ish pieces left on the sill. Whether it was food stores, eggs, or something else, I don't know enough about ants to really guess.

As he continued the clean-up he commented, "I've been in this business for 15 years and have never seen them nest in a radio like that."

I hoped that meant I was forgiven for never even considering that the ants might view the radio as anything other than an obstacle to walk around.

Guess I'm in the market for a new cheap radio.

P.S. -- I'm glad I didn't decide to move the radio before the pest-killer guy arrived. I wouldn't have known what to do with all those swarming ants!