I Miss My Ants

Yes, you read that title correctly. I miss the ants back in California. They're the type of ants you find in ant farms. They dig there homes underground, steal food at picnics, and are basically a nuisance. They are annoying but yet they're harmless. And silly me I thought that was how all ants behaved.

Then I moved to Louisiana. And the ants here are not the same. We have fire ants here. They're still black (although we had red ants back in California that were just as harmless), but they build their homes in mounds of dirt above ground. Unlike the herbivore California ants, they are carnivores and they bite you! Seriously! I had no idea ants bit before I lived here. With each bit they leave a bite of acid behind and you wind up with something similar to a mosquito bite. (Except you can pop them like a pimple! Sorry if that was too much info for you.)

During the two summers I was a camp counselor I would wind up covered in bites. Most often from just walking in the grass, but there was definitely a time or two I accidental sat in an ant pile. Now that I have a more normal 9-5, thankfully the ants bites are less. Except for when one decided to crawl up and bite me as I was laying out on my lawn chair in the back yard.

I complained to the boy, and now we own a nice bottle of ant poison. It smells awful (I guess that's why its poison?), but now once a week or so we spread it out on the ant piles. We definitely have less than we used to, but hopefully we can get rid of them for good.

What kind of ants do you have where you live? Do you think I'm crazy for not knowing ants bite? Or do you think its crazy that ants DO bite? And did you ever have an ant farm as a kid. I didn't, and I'm going to guess there's not a lot of people who did. But feel free to prove me wrong!

~Shoshanah