Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Oh, Ants


Ants are usually the bane of my existence, but lately I have become fascinated with them. I mean they can lift about twenty times their own body weight and they are so fastidious. I mean as a bit of a neat freak how could I not love an ant.
Well the fact that they are the one insect that bites me more than any other in this country and they regularly schedule raids on my food, I guess that could make me not love an ant. But like anyone else, I've learned to adapt. Now when ants get in my food, I eat them. Seriously when I look into my peanut butter jar and see a small platoon of ants stuck in the peanut butter like some modern day dinosaur trapped in the La Brea tarpits, what am I supposed to do? Throw away the jar? Heck no! You eat those little buggers and tell yourself, 'It's just more protein'. As for the biting, sadly or amazingly I've gotten to a place where I can be standing in a mound of fire ants and get bit a dozen times before I look down, wipe off the little guys and go about my business. I think that there's a rule somewhere that you have to have at least ten bug bites on you at all times or you're not really integrating.
But I digress. So I why am I amazed by these little tanks of terror? Ever seen an ant dismember and dispose of a bug 200 times his size? Amazing. So I decided to see how long it would take an army of ants to clean out a near empty jar of peanut butter. Why? Because there is no recycling in this country (except of glass bottles, but I'm pretty sure they just rinse and reuse those), so I try to find a use for everything and peanut butter jars are a pain to clean out.
Right now, we're on day four. They've done a pretty great job so far. The lid is spotless and the top inch or two of the jar has been licked clean. There was a big setback on day three. Torrential rains caused serious flooding in the jar and sadly lives were lost, but the remaining ants didn't give up, they sent in reinforcements and this morning they were bringing out the casualties.
I figure they'll have it cleaned out by the end of the week or I'll become bored with this and clean the rest out myself.
I've gotta start another secondary project.

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