Ants and other bugs

We have an ant problem. Well we had an ant problem. Thank goodness they are gone. The ants never seemed to bother him - he said he always had ants at his house growing up in Michigan and even got Ryan, another Michigander to corroborate the fact.

Me? I obsessed about the ants. This is why.

• They were most active on Saturday mornings before Aaron was awake - like they knew I was up and would obsesses about them - and then they would me mostly gone by the time Aaron got up.
• They came from everywhere but the big gap under the back door. The first two sighting originated from the bathroom, then the window, then the front door(!), and then somewhere in the bedroom upstairs, and Aaron had recurring visits at his computer desk upstairs.
• It just bothers me to have the ants there - makes me feel like the kitchen is not clean. I would carefully follow the little trail of travelers trying to figure out where they were coming from, where they were going, and why they were in my house!
• What were they eating? They did not go after the garbage. We don't leave food out and we are a lot more careful now about crumbs. They like Aaron's empty soda bottles he leaves at his desk.

Anyway. We bought some ant traps - the kind with the clear goo bait that they take back to their nests and then hopefully it calls them all. Got rid of the bigger ants. It took longer on the smaller ants that came in somewhere near the window and liked to walk on the counters, up the cabinets, in the cabinets, and down the front of the dishwasher (told you I obsessed). Eventually, they succumbed too after I put a trap along several points of their travel route.

Then I found ants in the bedroom. Eek! We don't even eat or drink in there! They were walking from the wall across the room to the bedside stand and getting water from Aaron's glass. Two nights of a glass with drowned ants confirmed this. Aaron switched to a bottle and I put in an ant trap. Then they stopped traversing across the room and instead crawled up the dresser. Swarmed it. Why? Because they were crawling into the water reservoir of the penguin humidifier to get water. I emptied it out into the bathtub and was amazed at the number of living and drowned ants inside.

Since then, very few ants. I always see one in the downstairs bathroom struggling through the jungles of fiber of the rug in there. I laugh at its struggles, quickly check to see if there is more than one, and then go about my business. Maybe I am little more tolerant. Maybe. There are tons of ants outside and I leave the alone.

So what now? I discovered this one night next to the door. About two inches long and creepy looking. Aaron said it was called a house centipede. I argued with him that there was no way it was a centipede because it didn't have enough legs, but watched it intently while making him go get something to kill it.

I also had to watch it because Aaron said they were really fast moving and I wanted to be sure to watch where it went. Aaron knows a lot about a little, but I still wasn't sure I believed him.

So what is it? It is in fact a house centipede and condsidered mildly beneficial because it likes to eat other insects in the home like ants, roaches, silverfish, and spiders. You don't want an infestation, but if you have these guys, then you may have bigger problems. Oops.

So in light of the fact that I do not want ants or any other bugs it likes to eat, the next time I saw one (a week later in the basement), I watched it, poked at it to confirm that it was a fast runner and exceedingly creepy, and then left it alone.