The War on Ants

Welcome, 6-legged reader, as I furnish you with the gory details of the war on ants.

Back in the UK, we're used to all sorts of weird things wandering into our kitchen: we live near a big pond, so it's damp, so we get slugs in the winter; there was of course that time when some wasps made their nest in our roof; the occasional cat would wander in; and yes, we'd get some ants. Here, I don't think it's ever damp or cold enough for you to see a slug, but the warmer weather does encourage a richer variety of insect life. And that includes ants.

My partner in crime here, Helen, really doesn't like ants. She especially doesn't like ants that think it's OK to come into our kitchen. Now your California ant is a different beast to the ones you see in the UK: unusually for this country, this ant is smaller than its UK counterpart. They look almost like tiny flecks of dust, they're so small. Anyway, they still don't belong in a kitchen, and Helen's made it her job to get rid of them.

Helen has an admirable passion for all things environmentally friendly, and she's also the most diligent person I've ever met. Those two amazing qualities intersect in a perfect storm to create what is certainly worthy of being known as the war on ants. This is of course a war in which no ants must be harmed, but they must be gently encouraged to go elsewhere, in a totally environmentally friendly way. Those gentle encouragements, often solicited from Internet advice, include:

• Talcum powder liberally distributed around the kitchen in the places the ants like to walk. Apparently they don't like it on their feet.

• Masking tape used to clog up gaps, cracks and holes where the ants could possibly get into the kitchen.

• Rosemary liberally distributed around the kitchen. Apparently ants don't like the smell of rosemary.

• Environmentally-friendly, lemon-scented ant repellent bags, again liberally distributed, which the ants aren't supposed to like.

• They're also not supposed to like coffee, and there's plenty of that about.

We've learned one big lesson from this, and that is: despite living in the heart of Silicon Valley, Californian ants don't read what's written on the Internet. They traipse through the talcum powder, inhale inspiring lungfulls of rosemary, get cosy with the lemon-scented bags, and head straight for the coffee. At least the last piece makes sense: this is hipster Silicon Valley, of course the ants love a single-origin espresso, just as much as the next hipster species. You pretty much see them wandering in, in their beanie hats on their one-wheeled electric skateboards.

Another hipster ant fails to read the signs

It turns out it's actually the coffee attracting them in after all. Full-strength or decaf, they can't get enough of quality ground coffee, so the main deterrent which seems to be working was moving the coffee machine off the worktop on the side, onto the island in the middle of the kitchen. This doesn't look great, but it at least means the queue of skateboarding hipster ants appear to be going elsewhere!