“The Flying Ant
Massacre”
As published in The Ant Express
The annual 2013 meeting of flying ants was thwarted
yesterday and ended in a horrific disaster which claimed the lives of an
estimated 4,000 attendees. The event was scheduled for the evening of Saturday
June 1st, to be held in the Master Bedroom of Villa #300. Nearly
5,000 were scheduled in attendance, but only those standing in the balcony
managed to escape the massacre. The venue site seemed ideal to hold the annual “Reunion
and Mating Matchup”; it houses three large venue halls, the tiled bathroom with
ample water reservoirs, the dressing and closet hall and the large bedroom
arena space with four screened windows and balcony doors. The main entry point
for the event was through the balcony patio doors, which supplies the perfect
clearance for allowing guests to crawl under the main doors even when shut, to join
the festivities.
“The first part of the evening was quite splendid. No one
would have imagined that everything would end in such horror!” says Mirda an
escaped survivor. Attendees seemed to
disperse themselves evenly throughout the event space; there were thousands
seen hanging on the yellow linen curtains or reclining from the vantage point
of the iron curtain rods; many chatting and finding mates, then moving to more
private or less private settings on the marble floor below.
Things took a turn for the worse close to midnight when a
female human, a presumed tenant of the house, entered to use the bathroom. A
few escapees, who managed to survive by default of choosing the curtains to
hang out on, recounted the events. A loud panicked scream was heard, and
moments later chaos broke out when the other presumed tenant, a male human,
entered the room. The two were heard exchanging a discussion of a plan of
attack and then they went about frantically shouting orders to one another.
Moments later a small black machine was brought up and the masses on the floors
and walls were seen being sucked into oblivion down a long pipe by the female.
Then the other assailant quickly dismantled all the curtains and rods, throwing
them out the balcony doors. Then, they began a systematic execution of the masses.
Swarms of guests at the entry point were sucked up, the closet walls and floors
scoured, and many were simply squashed with a white towel or brought to the
toilet to drown. A few hundred ants decided to swarm around the light sources
as they discovered this was too out of reach for the attackers. Within minutes
a large metal latter was brought up, and many more taken down.
One individual recounts the heroes who tried to
counterattack the assailants. “I saw a few heroic individuals intentionally
dropping themselves on the backs, and heads of the humans, they tried to crawl
down their arms in an effort to disgust them. It did appear to weaken their
efforts a bit.” Finally the couple seemed to reach exhaustion and were seen
scrambling for a white and purple device they found in a closet. They plugged
it in, and the room was instantaneously illuminated. They then fled the scene,
turning off all other light sources and shutting the door on their way out.
Harvey, a bystander viewing the scene from the balcony glass
doors woefully related what brought the remaining guests to their demise. “One
by one, individuals began to crowd and migrate towards that illumination
device. They seemed almost in a trance, so attracted by the light that they
ignored the consequences of walking into it. It was mass execution by
electrocution…by morning there were bodies piled up by the hundreds.”
No news yet of what kind of detrimental effect this will
have on the expected birth rates of the ant community for this year. A solemn
ceremony will be held tomorrow evening in the front yard in memory of those
that died.
“The Little Engine
That Could”
As told by the humans
This is the stuff of
nightmares; you know the kind when you hallucinate that your bed is covered in
bugs.... only it was real. Like a horror story, we came home from a party
yesterday night to find our bedroom, crawling and swarming with thousands of
flying ants. We had left a completely, or seemingly empty bugless room, just a
few hours earlier. We hadn’t left any balcony door or window screens open. Upon
returning home, I walked into the room and reached to open the curtains to let
some fresh air in through the screen before going to bed. I stopped just
short of the window to find hundreds of these winged ants spread across my
curtains and all on the walls. As I quickly looked around the rest of the room,
I saw hundreds of these things on every window curtain, on all of the walls,
and scattered on the floors. Not a surface was left untouched in our bathroom or the closet area corridor either. Now I consider myself bug tolerant, but this was mass
invasion!
Luckily these guys
are slow; they grow their wings just prior to monsoon season, so thankfully
they are not able to fly well. It took us 45 minutes to vacuum the majority up,
and then at a point of desperation we remembered our little mosquito killing
machine. I previously discounted that device, as slightly worthless at catching
mosquitoes, but I’ve since changed my mind…it’s the best $5 purchase I’ve spent in a
long time!
We turned that little
machine on and ran out with our toothbrushes and pajamas in hand. I was wary at
the numbers of ants we were leaving behind, fearing that that such a small
appliance was going to catch fire if it tried to electrocute so many. In the
middle of the night, we checked in to unplug it, and the whole room smelled
like burnt hair, which is apparently what hundreds of crispy ant bodies smells
like. The smell of SUCCESS!!
We tried to retire in
peace for the night (thank goodness for guestrooms) but needless to say, we
didn’t sleep well. It’s hard to shake the feeling of ants crawling down your
back, and paranoiac thoughts of them entering your nose and ears.
I awoke to a
satisfying pile of them dumped in the toilet by my husband the ant undertaker. We survived the night and maybe even
hopefully managed to make a dent in the number of mating ants in our
neighborhood. I’m quite happy though, to let the toads take care of the rest.
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