How to Attract Ants

June 27th, 2005

I got taken to ant hunting school last night by my girlfriend. We share an apartment and over the last couple days we noticed we were getting a few more ant visitors than usual. Our place has lots of trees practically growing out of the building foundation so we're used to seeing ants every once in a while, but this was worse.

While I admire and respect ants as being one of the more industrious and intelligent forms of insect life, I find them utterly disgusting. Especially when they're crawling on my pillow or across my plate.

After a day or two of this, my girlfriend decided she would nip this problem in the bud and build a couple of homemade ant traps. According to her, the only thing in ant traps is peanut butter... no poison, no toxins, no ant-eating bacteria... just peanut butter. Since she was so confident I didn't argue with her and allowed her to build two of these traps. Later that evening we decided to see how many ants we'd killed so I went into the bathroom to check on the Labatt 50 can trap. I turned on the lights and was equally disgusted and pleased by the number of ants around the trap. It appeared as though we had caught a lot of them. I moved in quickly to scoop up the piles of lifeless ant carcasses and was shocked to find that they weren't in fact dead but they were just sleeping (because their bellies were full of peanut butter, no doubt). As all 70 or more ants bolted awake and ran for cover, I was freaked out beyond belief... and slightly smarter. At this point I realized that peanut butter is not good for catching and killing ants but it is good if you want to herd all the neighbourhood ants into your house and feed them.

What an epiphany! Ok, snap back to reality... I got out the vacuum and took care of all the fat and slow ants that weren't quick enough to run away when I first went at them... now I know what you're thinking, "Steve you've just trimmed the herd of all the slower and stupider ants, thus creating a super race of quick and intelligent ants!" Don't worry, I went to Quickie and got some truly toxic ant killing traps. Funnily enough, they contained no peanut butter.