We had a potential invasion of ants the other day. Every now and then, millions (okay, thousands)of ants go marching along right near and sometimes right through our house and out the other side and are gone. While their marching form wouldn't do for soldiers in North Korea (or the US either) they are sufficiently well-trained and well-disciplined that they don't wander too far away from their ranks and actually infest your abode. You don't find wanderers who have nestled down in your underwear, for instance. Nonetheless, I prefer them confined outside our house. A wide and pretty typical parade of ant marchers was moving up from the front garden along the side of the house and to the back the other day. Our neighbor, our housekeeper and I made appropriate squealy noises upon seeing them, and Jim went and got his camera. Our neighbor showed us how to divert them. You lay down a long length of rope to channel them to where you would rather they go. Jim got the rope out of the bodega and the neighbor lay it down in a long wiggly line so that they would be diverted and go out the gate at the back. She said the ants thought the rope was a snake. I thought, "Wow! It worked." Jim said, though not to the neighbor, that it was where they were going anyway. Well, I thought that at least they'd closed ranks along the side of the rope away from our house.
The ants before being disciplined by the rope into a more compact line:
At this point I was going to insert a video of "The ants go marching..." but Typepad won't let me even though I followed the directions as far as I could understand them. Instead I give you this picture of very, very tiny white crawly things that were on one of Jim's small sculptures of a four-sided polygon on our balcón. In the photo they are magnified five or six times. They are smaller than the ants.
The green and black patches on the sidewalk and the sculpture are loving our weather and growing happily in the forever damp and chilly air.