… if there was one. Until then, we still have the ant overlords.
You think it’d be impossible to share your house with your wife, your daughter, and fifty million or so Argentine ants. And you would be correct.
…
There are billions of humans on earth, and trillions upon trillions of ants — an estimated 1.6 million for every human being. If the earth were a scale, and all the humans were placed on one side and all the ants on the other, it would not budge. Ants have answered the ever-expanding human biomass with an ever-expanding biomass of their own, so that the planet is poised, teetering between its two most successful civilizations — each of which is social, aggressive, expansionist, and well suited for war.
The tsunami of ant sisters that bother you are sterile. The hive stomach isolates colony poisons by sacrificing itself. Only the oldest ants go topside. Metabolic poisons have little effect upon colony reproduction. 50:50 powdered boric acid ground into flour is only aesthetic. Raid is a silly waste of money.
No biggie. The only important ants are the reproductive castes. Reproductive poisons hit the queen and the larvae after harmlessly passing through the hive stomach. The colony is dead and irrecoverable from the bottom up..
The magic potion is Nylar,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyriproxyfen
or methprene to a lesser extent, neither of which has any toxicity, LD50s around 50,000 mg/kg. They derail insect reproduction and metamorphosis.
Dose honey or flour – NO poison! Set out square foot sheets of aluminum foil generously dotted with dosed honey or flour. Add wide tape loading and unloading ramps. A terrifying flood of ants will clean their plates 24/7. Generously replenish. Your problem will disappear in 1-3 months as the 99% top of the colony dies of senescence.
One posits ethidium bromide would also work gonzo – but it would be wrong (and interesting to watch – dyed worker abdomens to died ant royalty).