Ants

We live in a home built the same year Star Wars released, and it's slanting toward winter in the Northern Hemisphere, so that means one thing: ant season.

Say hello to our leetle "friends"

If you've ever had to deal with ants in your living space, you know they get into everything and can be nearly impossible to eradicate. Most other insects you can just swat, spray or trap and be done, but ants are different. They live in large underground colonies; the ants you see are merely advance food scouts for the entire colony. If you kill them, the colony just sends more scouts. Further, as it gets colder outside, the colony sends scouts into warm human homes where food is always plentiful.

We think the ants are coming up from the crawl space under our home, but we can't figure out where the colony is, and at the moment we can't afford to pay an exterminator.

So it's time to use some strategy. And bait.

Fast-acting poison isn't the best choice against ants -- as mentioned, if you kill the scouts, the colony just sends more -- so it's more effective to use ant bait. Ideally, if you have sugar ants, you need a sweet bait that contains borax, a slow-acting poison. When the scouts find this bait, they can't get enough of it. (A few actually climb into the bait station and drown in the stuff, it's so good.) Then they take their hoard of delicious poison back to the colony. They feed it to other ants. They feed it to ant larvae. And eventually, if we're lucky, they feed a lot of it to their queen.

At first it seems like you're just giving the ants free lunch, because the number of scouts actually increases as everyone goes to the bait station to fill up on the new food source for the colony. But then things start to shift in the anthill. You see, borax makes it impossible for ants to digest food, so they eat and eat and eat and are still constantly hungry. Eventually, when the queen has been fed enough poison, she starves to death -- and the entire colony dies with her.

So, to reiterate: the best way to destroy a colony is to freely offer a substance that tastes like real nourishment, is delicious and plentiful, and is perniciously toxic, slowly making it impossible for the colony to digest anything that's good. And if you can successfully poison the colony's leader, everything else dies.

I can't help but think there's an analogy to be found there somewhere.