Ulukai on 23/7/2010 at 18:36
Got home from work tonight and was confronted with not one, but two ant nests. First, right outside the front door where the cunning fuckers had turfed all the sand out in between the slabs and were evidently having some kind of ant kegger party underneath judging by the way they were spilling out and going in circles with seemingly no real purpose.
Secondly, I'm cutting the lawn (yep, rock and roll Friday night), and I notice a mound of earth in the grass. I prod it with a trowel and a big mass of ants and ant eggs spew forth from the lawn. This was particularly grim, especially the eggs.
Boiling water and ant-powder saved the day, although a combination of this means I now having a steaming white patch in my back lawn which makes it look suspiciously like a geyser field. Further monitoring of the situation will be required I feel - especially as in this country any kind of insecticide is so rigorously controlled I'll be surprised if any of them have more than a slight headache and nasty rash at 0.00001ppm of the poisonous stuff.
I suspect these are common (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavement_ant) Pavement Ants, which really aren't that bad in comparison to others in the world. I guess some of you have had far worse - what's the deal with
your unwanted wildlife?
kabatta on 23/7/2010 at 18:52
A have regular roaches. I tried every possible insecticide i know and the bugs thrive. I'd like to kill them with fire along with my belongings. Maybe like that I'd have my old insect-free house.
Medlar on 23/7/2010 at 19:04
Living on the side of a cliff makes for interesting wildlife encounters. Couple of years ago I put up a bird table in a cliff shelf level with our bedroom window, had to stabilise it with a horizontal stake driven into the cliff, the following morning we were treated to the sight of half a dozen rats expertly using the stake to gain access to the table! The table came down the same day...
We have regular visits from Adders, Grass Snakes, Slow Worms and the area between our house and the cliff is a Horseshoe and pipistrellel bat highway at this time of the year :D
Queue on 23/7/2010 at 19:22
Boiling hot water is the best solution for ants (much like soapy water is the best solution for killing whiteflies and aphids)--poisons are not effective for very long, and are mostly a waste of money.
Apart from all the damned coyotes that the State's DNR released to keep the rabbit population down (thus causing a swift decline in cats instead of rabbits, and the chasing of herds of deer out into the roads at night), I keep trapping skunks and having to haul to little bastards some twenty miles away so they won't find their way back.
They're surprisingly docile and curious, and have yet to even attempt to spray me.
Bluegrime on 23/7/2010 at 19:32
Goddamn tree rats.
For the record I don't live in a tree.
But they are coming in, gnawing holes in the walls and wiring, then retreating back to their little tree fort. My proposed solution of setting fire to the trees around my house wasn't greeted with open arms by my neighbors, so I've been reduced to ripping out siding and putting in a wire screen to stop them. Since they don't actually stay or live in the house this should solve the problem.
Or if that dosen't work I'll wrap rat wire around my neighbors pecan tree and see if that helps any.
Edit - Oh, and like Queue I disdain coyotes. I'm not big on pets so that isn't so much of a problem for me, but those yipshits can make it hard to sleep.
june gloom on 23/7/2010 at 20:13
We have house centipedes (they mostly stay in the cellar), dozens of spiders (they mostly stay outside, on the sides of the house) and ants, who have not been a problem this year like they have in the past. I've seen at least 7 or 8 house centipedes outside the cellar this past month, however, one of them a juvenile, and I'm really getting sick of seeing the fuckers.
Spiders, fortunately, have remained largely outside this year (despite a record number of the little shits hanging out on the side of the house- I'm convinced they're coming from a nearby tree) but I had to kill what looked like a brown recluse the other night. Most of the ones outside are stationary little white bastards, but they vary wildly in size. There was a huge one just hanging out on the front doorknob last night- I went in through the back. We have a couple tiny little grey mottled jumping spiders in the backyard but they don't bother anyone and they don't come in.
We did have a serious ant problem a couple years ago where we laid down like 20 traps and they did no good, until we found out where their nest was- inside a potted plant. Plant was trashed, problem solved.
kabatta on 23/7/2010 at 20:37
Another pest problem: dogs. I bet India is the soul sister of Romania in terms of dog population. 3-4 at every street. And I swear one night they woke me up at 3 am and when i look out the window i see every dog barking at I don't know what and another one that sat with his behind on the street howling at the moon. All cute and nice, but I'd strangle them bare handed. :mad:
Aggressive little loonies. (your coyotes reminded me of them)
Also, do loiterers count as pests? :P
Queue on 24/7/2010 at 01:45
Quote Posted by dethtoll
...but I had to kill what looked like a brown recluse the other night.
Inline Image:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Loxosceles_reclusa_adult_male_4.jpgLoxosceles reclusa, or the violin spider...nasty little devils, that do get up into southern Ohio. So watch out. What's really cool are its three eyes (as noted in the picture).
My grandfather, living in Mississippi at the time, always had a habit of shaking out his shoes in the morning to knock out the previous days dirt from the fields. One morning, he shook out a brown recluse.
Spiders don't normally give me the willies (the greenhouses are full of them--every time I carry a flat, I've got my hands up in a shit ton of spiders, and I'll constantly see little spiders dangling from the legs of my glasses when I'm out there working), but there was the time I helped my father bring a wood stove back from Missouri that, after sticking our arms in and wresting onto the truck, upon driving all the way back to Michigan did we discover it was full of black widows. That was unsettling.
catbarf on 24/7/2010 at 02:10
My house is infested with two-inch-long hairy centipede things. I don't know what they are, but they're not centipedes- their legs are half an inch to an inch long. The bastards are fast and like to jump from walls and ceilings at things, including my face.
june gloom on 24/7/2010 at 02:45
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_centipede) Is this it? Because these little fuckers are ALL OVER THE FUCKING PLACE.
Oh, we had a couple of earwigs running around this year too, but I haven't seen one since the Cereal Incident.
