Dead Bodies Everywhere

Our house has become an ant cemetery.  And I now know more about Carpenter Ants that I want to.

After seeing and killing more ants in the last fortnight than in the whole previous year (and that's saying something!), and after discovering some a centimeter and a half long with wings on their backs, I finally* called up the Bugman.

Turns out the winged Carpenter Ants we've been seeing are actually kings and queens reestablishing a colony; a colony they seem to think should be located in our kitchen wall.  Not pleasant.

Anyway, whatever the ant man has baited them with in the kitchen (and I'm guessing it's stronger than our Golden Syrup), it very quickly made the smaller worker ants drop to the floor, go schizo round the house, then slowly turn in circles, before finally curling up in a ball and kacking it. Which means we're finding dead ants all over the house - every time you walk in to a room you see another dozen on the floor, under the kids toys, on the units, next to the sink: how they get to the places we find them is beyond me.  The royalty only seemed to make an appearance today, 48 hours later, and are currently swarmed on the roof of our kitchen ceiling, just kinda, 'hangin'.  I'm hoping they'll forgo the schizo phrase and just die quietly, or preferably, head back to the colony and kill everyone else, but we don't really know...

...so we left them to it and went to the fair:

But at least they're not roaches.

* To update last May's post, the Don found out that the ants were nesting in the large tree outside our spare room, climbing through a small crack in the outside wall, then entering the room through a skirting board.  We sealed the cracks outside and in, and also a couple more in the dining area that the ants seemed to favour, and that seemed to solve the biggest of the problems.  For a few months anyway.  Then they seemed to find their way in through the mismatched cornicing around the top of the kitchen.  In fact, the kitchen seems to be such a botch DIY job that a whole piece of cornicing is missing in the top corner above the fridge unit, so there is no way to reach it let alone seal the gaping hole.  We hadn't actually seen many of the large carpenter ants in the kitchen over the last few months, certainly nothing like the number we used to find in the spare room, but the smaller ones that were appearing were definitely more aggressive and inquisitive and stubborn, and so the killings were frequent.  Then in the last couple of weeks, the big winged yins started appearing in swarms...