Weird unverified fact about ants

I own a house. I mean, I have a mortgage so it’s not free and clear, but for the sake of simplicity: I own a house and it’s a great house and I feel very lucky to be in this position.

However!

There is this one thing about the house that we discovered shortly after moving in three years ago, and it is driving me bonkers. It also makes me curse the previous owners a little for not disclosing what they MUST have known, but ahhh that is a story for another day 😁

Every once in a while, usually on a hot summer evening, I’ll go on a rampage. When the rest of the family is in bed I’ll creep around the house, find a likely spot, crouch down, squash my face up against a wall, and strain my ears for the soft sound of rustling. Some people say it sounds like running water, or popcorn.

I am listening for the sound of carpenter ants.

We have carpenter ants… somewhere. I don’t know where. But I know they are there because in the summer we see them, worker ants marching around trying to steal the honey we spilled on the counter, and usually once the summer is in full swing, great big ones (I mean they are HUGE. Disgustingly huge.) with wings come out, and I know that means there’s an established nest SOMEWHERE… that we can’t seem to locate or get rid of and it is driving me absolutely insane because I know that carpenter ants = water damage = rotting wood = house slowly being eaten from the inside out.

The internet opinion here is mixed. “Carpenter ants are not as bad as termites.” I have read fairly frequently. “It takes years for them to do any real damage,” the local professional pest control company tells me. “Don’t worry too much.”

But then I read a reddit thread where some contractor talks about a bathroom renovation he did where when they pulled out the old bathtub the wood around it was riddled with carpenter ant galleys and the giant wooden beams were as light as a feather when they should have weighed several kilograms.

So naturally I have this image in my head of my house suddenly collapsing on one side due to these ants that I cannot find.

We’ve hired pest people each year, we’ve cut open walls where we think they might be, we’ve drilled holes and injected poison into wall cavities… we have spent thousands of dollars, and… nothing.

So it kind of makes me crazy, and I wonder if everyone around me thinks I am crazy… I SWEAR THERE ARE ANTS I AM NOT IMAGINING THE ANTS.

On the plus side, the last time pest control came they found a nest in the fence and did a big spray and the next day there was a massive pile of dead ants on the ground by the fence. I like to tell myself maybe they were just in the fence all along and they’re not actually living in the house, and now the problem has been permanently solved.

I’m not a total monster, I do have empathy! Here I am having pest control companies harass and kill these poor ants endlessly in an attempt to save my house from imminent collapse… meanwhile the ants are just trying to live out their happy little ant lives doing what ants do. Can’t we coexist in peace? Can’t they just chew their wood and make their little homes and live happily ever after? Isn’t there a way to let that happen? Well, no there’s no way of this to happen but I wish there was a way.

So that’s the backstory…. and the backstory is probably going to be longer than what I actually wanted to write about, which is this weird thing I learned about ants after experiencing it for myself and doing a bit of googling. (Warning: No peer reviewed study here, but I believe it. Feel free to find a source for me and I’ll add it to this post 😉 )

Earlier this year, after an interior spray in the house (which, by the way, I hate doing. No matter how safe “they” claim pesticides are this just seems like bad news to me. But desperate times call for desperate measures…)

Anyway! After the spray, we began to find dead ants, as well as living ants that were behaving like they were drunk - and eventually died as well - hanging out by a doorway downstairs.

You’d sweep them up and a few hours later there would be a new hoard of them. Always in the same area.

This went on for weeks, dead ants on the doormat, dazed ants wandering around until they ultimately collapsed.

But WHY? I mean sure they were impacted by the poison, but why were they all congregating here? It was kind of way out in the open, and definitely not particularly close to where a nest could be.

Well it turns out that ants have graveyards a safe distance from their nest, to avoid contaminating the rest of the nest with deadly diseases. Ok sure that seems familiar, I’m sure I’ve read that in a book somewhere before.

But get this: Ants that have a certain “death” chemical (Oleic acid) on them will MARCH THEMSELVES to the designated graveyard and just hang out there and wait to die. Once the chemical wears off they realize they aren’t dead and they return to the nest. Here’s a video where someone tries it out. 🤯 I don’t know if that’s what was going on with my drunken ants - that chemical only is supposed to be secreted once they are already dead - but they certainly seemed to recognize something was wrong and a graveyard trip was in order.

Ok that’s all I got. This blew my mind and I hope it blows yours too. Which me luck with my ongoing battle with the ants.