Tuesday, October 6

The Setup


Well of course the ant traps do not work. I know this because, even though the number of ants has diminished considerably, there is still a terrorist group that insists to meet inside my boiler. I do not know what exactly attracts them to my boiler ... Probably it is the considerable warm and fuzzy feeling the boiler emanates after i use it to boil water. This compared to the freezing (24-25 C) temperatures in the lab. I don't know what it is exactly, but the fact of the matter is that every morning before I put water to boil for my (yuck) instant coffee, I have to kill a couple of ants and fish some from the small water puddle that is still inside the boiler. I hate starting my day in such a murderous manner, so I put up the setup you see in the picture, namely I attached an ant trap to the boiler lid. I did this yesterday, and today the number of ants is the same (you can see two bodies in the corner left of the picture). I wonder if there are more powerful traps out there.

5 comments:

dor said...

The same thing happened to me last sem with my kettle. In the end I gave up and had the kettle put away. thankfully my current room is giving no such problems.. looi postulated before that yes, the ants are freezing and they seek thy kettle for heat..

claudia said...

This will NOT happen here! I has to have mah coffee or else. It's comforting in some sense that Adrian also wasted his computing cycles to think why were the ants meeting in your kettle. But only in some sense i guess :))

jensen said...

actually the ants are just seeking a drink. it's like that at home also. they'll crawl into cups with water in them, or those water containers. i think they run around too much, they're dehydrated. So the best thing to do is put your boiler away, or leave a small plate of water near the ants' path so they don't venture any further than that. try it! it may actually work.

claudia said...

Oh I see .. I would experiment with that as well, but it seems that the trap is working... today at 9am there were no ants in my boiler!!

adrian said...

I used to think that the ants wanted a drink but nay! They will still crowd around kettles even when it is raining. Might it really be that they wanted a drink under some heat? Like a pub you know...