Thankfully, they're not roaches. Especially in the numbers and persistence I'm currently dealing with, a roach infestation like this would be shades of Cypress Springs 2004, or maybe worse. No, they're ants. Little, itty-bitty black ants. They're faster than many ant species I've had to deal with in the past and other very weird problems have sprung up as an obvious result of their adoption of my home as theirs.
Yesterday afternoon, I went to turn on the ceiling fan in my bedroom by flipping the wall switch. The fan didn't move. I flipped the switch down and up again. Nothing. I tried to turn the torchiere light near the far side of my bed on since it's the switch right next to the ceiling fan. It did nothing. The lamp remained dark. What the fuck? I checked the circuit breaker box to see if some power surge had occurred causing a circuit to be flipped. Nothing. All circuits normal.
Perplexed, I looked again at the light switch and I noticed about three tiny ants crawling on the switch plate and as I watched, a fourth popped out of the tiny space between the switch and the plate to join his brothers. Could ants have caused a problem with the electrical connection inside the switch? I shuddered to think how many ants it would take to cause that. Sure enough, as I unscrewed the switch plate and focused my small LED flashlight in there, I saw many more ants crawling all around. Oh shit. The wiring seemed to be intact and I expected that to be the case since these ants are so tiny, there'd be no way they could "eat through" the insulation of the wires. But there were, like any electrical switch box, some parts of the wire where it is screwed up under the contacts that are exposed. Did the ants get electrocuted by forming a connection with their bodies as they cluttered up the switch box? Again, there weren't THAT many as I looked at the wires right now, but maybe earlier?
I called maintenance and let them know I need them to come out for the dead light switch and to have pest control come out for the ants. I know from experience that apartment complexes rarely "hop to it" when summoned to do maintenance so I didn't really expect them within the few hours that remained of the normal work hours so after I got tired at my usual bedtime, I did stay up a little bit later "just in case" but eventually went to bed around 5:30 pm.
I really had needed a good sleep so I slept past the normal wake up time of around 10 pm and was awoken by the blast of my smoke detector going off. I jumped out of bed and noticed it was 1:30 am. I quickly made my way into the kitchen thinking that I may have left the oven on and it was creating smoke causing the alarm. No, it was off. When I went back to my bedroom, I looked at the light switch and it was covered with ants. The ants formed jagged lines running all up the lintels of the bedroom door and along the junction of the wall and ceiling all along the west side of the bedroom. Oh Hell No!
The next few hours I sprayed, scrubbed and generally made my entire apartment as clean as possible. These fuckers are looking for food! They're not gonna get it here.
So now, hours later my apartment is spotless, especially the wall around the light switch since I tried to eliminate their trails. There's a slight dusting of what looks like black mold along the baseboards, but I know it's the hundreds of dead ants fallen there after my repeated spraying. I'm almost out of RAID though and I really want to wait for professional pest control since I've read here on the internet that I should know what I'm trying to kill and to target the queen and her minions rather than just wipe out the foragers. They're expendable and will be replaced quickly, or worse, I could cause the colony to scatter creating more of a problem elsewhere in the apartment.
So far they're restricted to this immediate bedroom west wall area, except for some stragglers that got out of the bedroom. like the ones marching into my smoke detector setting it off about four times throughout the night before I unscrewed it, sprayed it and let it dangle from the ceiling. It's hard wired so I can't disconnect it but they haven't tripped it yet since I did that a few hours ago.
I will win this war but it's just so frustrating. I guess there really is no safe haven from bugs in Florida. Part of the price we pay to live in an environment of endless summer.
I read these fuckers might be what's called "crazy ants" and they've been known to cause electrical problems like the one I've had. And now I think they might have been the cause of the multiple power surges I've had to this northwest corner of my bedroom...where my computer is. Maybe they even got into the Dell that was in place before the current one and caused its power supply failure?
Another reason I think they are in here is that right outside the northwall of the bedroom, on the porch, there are a mass number (maybe a dozen or so?) of Daddy Longleg spiders and their webs up in the eaves and corners. Are they causing havoc with the ants who probably have that area as their main outdoor/indoor access point? I mean, if the spiders are eating the ants as they go out to forage for food from that entrance, once they start to not return the colony has to find alternate routes, right? And my eating at this desk probably doesn't help either.
Well, the sun is up so I can see them. I think I'll declare war on the spiders too in order to ease up the stress they're putting on the ants. I think when fighting what could be many thousands of ants, it's probably better to have them find a way out of your home so they can move on to greener pastures. At least that's what I'm hoping. Otherwise, it's nuke time for them.
We are man. We have the technology. We have the horrific insecticides and baits. We will prevail. The only good bug, is a dead bug, Rico! Remember Buenos Aires! Become a Citizen and Join Today!!!