Aunt vs. Ants

So the other day I noticed a few little ants scurrying around my bathroom. Yep, that's right. My bathroom. Why on earth they chose that room I will never know. I do not keep food in my bathroom, and they did not seem to have found anything to eat. They were just wandering around.

After a couple of days, I got tired of having to squish a few ants every time I went in to my bathroom, so I bought ant traps to get rid of them. However, the package did not warn me that the bait inside the traps is sooooo tantalizing to ants that they would first bring SWARMS more ants into my house. Imagine my horror when I went to check the traps and found dozens and dozens of ants swarming around them! YUCK!

Fortunately, I'd read online that ants hate black pepper. So I decided to employ some in hopes of containing the ant swarms. Of course, being the pretentious foodie that I am, I do not keep pre-ground black pepper in my house. Nooooo, I buy whole black pepper and then grind it fresh in my pretty stainless steel pepper mill.

So I had to grind a whole bunch of black pepper for the ants.

That done, I made little walls of freshly-ground black pepper around each of the traps so that the ants would not wander too far. It worked surprisingly well! Occasionally one ant would get adventurous and try to climb up the wall and around the pepper barrier, but for the most part, they stayed far away from the pepper, and contented themselves with whatever delicious bait was in the traps.

Here's what it looked like:

And here's my silly pepper grinder temporarily in residence in my bathroom:

The trap-and-pepper setup was completed last night and I hesitantly went to bed, imagining thousands of ants taking over my bathroom in search of more traps... But when I woke up this morning, there were only a couple of ants in sight! Most of them seemed to have crawled back to their nests to die (and hopefully share their poison with their brothers and sisters). By now they have almost completely disappeared. Hooray!

Turns out the Auntie triumphed over the icky anties...at least for now!