Prevention

Each spring for the past three or four years, ants have invaded my home. They liked the kitchen and bathroom sinks and the pipes around the toilet.

I’d spray them a few times and they’d eventually stop visiting. I assumed they’d found better pickings outside.

But this spring was different – and two of my cats were the problem. More precisely, their bowls of cat food were the problem.

I have three cats:

1. Margaret Thatcher
2. Debra Harry – or Blondie to her friends.
3. R. L. Burnside

Maggie paying a visit to R.L.

Burnsey’s cat food wasn’t the problem. Because he has a penchant to attack Blondie, he’s sequestered upstairs. He gets furloughed downstairs two or three times per week – but spends most of his time with a run of the second floor.

He gets fed upstairs and his food is never a target for the ants because – well, quite frankly – R.L. is a glutton who licks his bowl clean in a few blinks of the eye every time he’s fed.

Maggie & Blondie sharing the window.

But the other two cats are nibblers.

I’d put their food out – Maggie gets fed on the kitchen table and Blondie on the kitchen floor – and come home to find what looked like coffee grounds in the cats’ bowls. The coffee lookalikes were, of course, swarms on unwanted ants.

Sorry, ants, but I couldn’t live with that situation. So I took action.

If you’ve been following along, you know that I did some research and found a remedy for the unwanted ants to be a mixture of three parts sugar to one part borax. I placed containers of the bait on the kitchen sink, in front of the refrigerator, in the bathroom, and outside my front and back doors.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve won those battles – but not the war. Not just yet. There’s the occasional rogue ant that pays a visit. To me, they’re like those Jap snipers who used to hide in the palm trees in those old World War II movies.

(No apologies from me for using the term “Jap snipers” or for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

So when a rogue ant appears, I snuff it out immediately.

From this point on, my strategy is two-fold:

1. Reinforcement at the key locations.
2. Prevention

My first step toward prevention was to concoct a method of feeding the cats in the normal way that they’re accustomed to – while at the same time preventing the ants from swarming in their bowls.

The solution was quite simple:

1. Fill small plastic picnic plates with a thin covering of water.
2. Place the bowls of cat food on top of the picnic plates.

In effect, I’m building a moat around the cat bowl. The cats can now nibble as they see fit and the ants can’t swim across the water to get at the food. So they no longer are attracted to the cat food.

I’ve been doing this for about three weeks now and there haven’t been any ants in the vicinity of the bowls since then.

In my next post, I’ll discuss reinforcing my defensive outposts – and I won’t quit until the ants have abandoned my residence entirely.

In addition to being the official Eagles Outsider for BlameMyFather.com, Barry Bowe is also the author of:

• Born to Be Wild
• 1964 – The Year the Phillies Blew the Pennant
• 12 Best Eagles QBs
• Birth of the Birds
• Soon-to-be-published sexy, police procedural Caribbean Queen
• Soon-to-be-published novel Stosh Wadzinski
• Soon-to-be-published novel Polish Widow