The ants, very small ants, just a couple of millimeters in length, came marching in from outside my apartment block, from at least two levels down, making a turn outside my bathroom, streamed in through its partly opened louvers.
I stumbled on them in the process of establishing a colony behind the pile of warm dry towels stacked on a top shelf. Even so various foraging columns were already streaming out to various parts of the bathroom. And one party was gnawing on the inside of the porcelain wash basin which I only used for brushing my teeth.
That was when I first noticed the ants and for a moment was wondering what food could there be on those smooth white surface. The only thing I could think of was the oils in the mouthwash that I used, and these had somehow become coated to the basin's surface.
Then I looked up and saw streams of ants running hither tither all over the bathroom.
Tracing one of these stream I discovered the colony-in-making, and was shocked to see how dense the column was, almost a centimeter in width, as it entered behind the towel, and with some ants tipped with a white spot on the heads, which I presumed were their eggs.
Removing the towels immediately I commenced my brutal annihilation campaign with my only weapon - a can of insecticide. This was very effective against the tiny ants, and I hoped I killed the queen too. But more importantly I hoped the insecticide overwhelmed any scent of the ants' pheromone that made their trails and marching columns, so that they will never discover my bathroom again.
I then went to an adjacent room and saw where the ants were coming from, and it was then I saw them marching from below my flat. Perhaps their original colony was destroyed or disturbed by some family doing their Chinese New Year spring cleaning, but it may be something else too, and I really would never know.
Then I went to the kitchen and from there attacked the outside column. I could reach the louver windows, the turn, and down the wall to just below my window. The aerosol spray from the can of insecticide could go no further below. But these two attacks - inside and outside - were effective in stopping the colonisation, at least for the moment.
For there were certainly lots of stragglers already somewhere in the house that my attack missed.
And there are two worries now. First some of these stragglers might find a new route back to the colony, and the colonisation restarts all over again, this time with another entry point. This had happened before. The second hypothesis, perhaps the more worrying one, is the one of the straggler ants could morph into a queen and establish a new colony itself with all the stragglers. But I do not know if the second hypothesis is at all plausible. I could only wait and watch.
And so I spent the next days spotting and tracking stragglers and some of them have found new homes in some crevice here and there, behind cabinets, in the walls, etc. and the attacks continued. I had not seen any ants marching in from the outside; but of course a new colonisation, by these same colony of ants or yet another, could have already happened, totally undetected.And so both hypotheses are yet to be denied.
So the killing go on, and I need a new can of insecticide.
