I had thought my problem was ants. Tiny little ants that gradually invaded my house for the past couple of months and formed into armies two weeks ago, after the dreadful Pepco mega outage. There were dozens of them on even the tiniest morsel of food left on the kitchen floor, and seemingly hundreds of them started attacking the cat food bowl even while the kitty was still eating from it. Yuck.
Well, the guy that was sent by my favorite pest control company showed up this morning and set out to explore the perimeter of my house for ant hills (or nests, as he called them).
No nests could be sighted. What he found instead, was every creepy thingy, pest and vermin imaginable. There were a couple of carpenter bee holes in the fence, paper wasp nests under a seat on the deck, large spider nests outside the garage and lady bugs that might live in the walls. The worst, however, was a football-sized nest of bald-faced hornets right above my kitchen door. The entrance to the hive-like thing was crawling with huge inch-long wasps. “And these are really nasty ones,” the exterminator explained. “They will attack you massively if you just stare at them.”
How could I have missed this all??!! Perhaps it’s the weather — it’s been so brutally hot that we haven’t spent too much time outside. (Note to self: never again judge home sellers who might have missed a little infestation here or there…)
Another two hours and multiple treatment measures later (I pitied the guy who came to bait ants and ended up having to climb around my house in a beekeeper’s suit, in 100 F heat), the tiny ants on the kitchen counter looked, well, sweet and harmless.
If you own a home in the DC area, here’s my advice for you: grab a pair of binoculars or even just your sunglasses when you come home today, and then go around the house to check if nature might be trying to take over your place as well.