Ants in my... Hostel

I've written before about our hostel here in Cancun (Hostel Kankun), easily the cheapest hostel in Cancun. Indeed, it may be the cheapest hostel anywhere in North America, if not the world. It is certainly the cheapest I've ever encountered in a big resort town.

Reviews are mixed, naturally, with many complaints about bugs. I was pleasantly surprised, then, when I moved in & noticed very few 4,5,6,7, or 8-or-more-legged critters.

Having said that.. attentive readers may have noticed something curious about that last comment: the word "noticed." On closer inspection, it seemed the room was teeming with tiny (I mean teeny tiny little) ants. It reminded me of a story Jay Leno once told about leaving a chocolate cake unattended in a dingy apartment & later suddenly *noticing* that it was moving.

Ewww!

No-see-ems. See them milling about near the left-side nail?

   
Point is: these guys are really small. Actually, one of the little stinkers literally just crawled onto my keyboard & disappeared into the innards of my laptop.. Oh, wait - he just reappeared near my touchpad.. only to disappear again under my space bar... grrrrrr. If this post is delayed, you'll know why.

Anyway, I did some googling and it seems these critters are called "no-see-'ems," which I find especially amusing because "N.S.E." is also a great acronym for insects that can change direction several times a second. N.S.E.W.s might be even better. Of course, I tend to call them other (unprintable) names, as well as things like barely-see-ums & hard-to-see-ums, because, even with eyesight compromised by lack of sleep & years of close reading, I could in fact kinda-see-em.

Anyway, I started killing the little monsters with duct tape, only to have dozens more appear in their stead. I was reminded of Mao Zedong's willingness to sacrifice a third of the Chinese population in a nuclear war (as long as it would help bring about the downfall of world capitalism), & I recalled seeing an estimate that ants (+ termites) make up 20 percent of the planet's animal biomass, & I remembered an old "Twilight Zone" Episode (I think) in which a germophobe kills a cockroach, only to have his entire apartment invaded by billions of vengeful roaches. The episode ends with the man dead, and roaches crawling out of his ears, eyes & nose, or something like that.

Hmmm.

In any case, the duct tape method was clearly hopeless, tho it was kind of fun in a sick way, like the Sniper (video game) app I have on my phone. So I started searching for a way to get rid of them, or at least keep them off the counter.

Then, as I was unpacking my tools, I had a brainstorm: why not use grease as a barrier? It was genius! First I did a test, smearing a circle of grease around an ant. This was harder than it sounds, because no-see-ums are also very-speedy-ums and it was hard to load enough grease on my finger to surround the little punk before he escaped. Anyway, I did manage to encircle one & prove my theory that they would not cross a finger-wide barrier of lithium grease. He ran around & around the ring, looking in vain for an exit. By this time I so despised the little NSEs that I was tempted to leave him there, forever running round the ring, a curious tribute to Dante's circles of hell, or maybe make a Colossal ring in which to stage ant-vs-spider gladiatorial spectacles.

Instead, I crushed him with duct tape, cleaned up my experimental grease pit, and smeared a 20' ring of grease up & down the wall, tracing the outline of the whole counter. Some time later, I saw an ant running along beside it trying to break through. Kinda like a Mexican illegal trying to cross the border, I thought. Yep. Heehaw! Mission Accomplished.

Or so I thought...

I awoke the next day feeling great. 5 minutes later, I felt like a failure. Kinda like George W. Bush, I thought. Mission Accomplished? The ants were back, racing around by the dozen atop the counter. My grease barrier was as "impregnable" as the Maginot line or the US border fence (a replica of which Mexican workers hired by Penn & Teller for an episode of Bullshit scaled, smashed through, & tunneled under in a couple of minutes).


Hmm.


Perhaps the lithium in the grease was actually attracting them. If Catherine Zeta-Jones could suffer from bipolar disorder, surely an N.S.E. could too. In any case, I was back to square one.

Time for google, I thought. If I could harness the planet's entire corpus of ant-killing knowledge, what chance did these little insects have? If they had any chance at all, I muttered, I could barely see 'em. Hehehe.

So...


It turns out there many ways to tackle NSEs. I skipped the most unlikely (anything involving spices, ant ashes, pentagrams, or indigenous dances) and moved on to the most promising, which I have listed below in reverse order of potential:

4) borax

3) borax

2) borax

1) brimstone & hellfire!

As tempted as I was to burn down the place, I settled on Borax and added it to my Walmart shopping list.

On my next visit to Walmart, I found the borax, then had a change of heart. What right did I, a recent arrival in Cancun & a foreigner no less, have to kill these simple innocent creatures. Remember that movie, Joe's Apartment? I almost felt a sense of kinship for the little guys (when i wasn't squishing them).

I returned to my google search & spotted something that I hadn't seen or noticed before: ants, apparently, won't cross a line of calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate? Isn't that... Yes, it is! It's also called.. chalk!

So, as tempted as I was to kill the whole colony (which borax does when the ants bring it back to the nest), I settled on chalk and added that to my shopping list.

On my next visit to Walmart, I found a box of colored chalk, and happily added it to my cart. With 24 different colors, I could match the red & cream-colored walls, & have chalk left over to paint the sidewalks & play some hopscotch with the neighborhood kids.

I also bought some big blue tarps to cover the tiles on the counter & floors in the room (which I found esthetically unappealing, not to mention disgusting). Even after a thorough cleaning, the floors seemed dirty, as tho encrusted with the ghostly goop of a thousand random backpackers, a breed of traveler not noted for cleanliness.

Anyway, the chalk worked pretty well, tho I still find an occasional ant on the counter. Whether they fly, glide, sneak across on a straw left touching the wall, or drop from the ceiling, I'm not sure. I do know that I often find them on my skin mere moments after leaving the shower, but whenever I look for them on the ceiling, naturally, of course, I no-see-em.

The ants did reappear a few weeks after the initial application (when we left an entire pizza out!), so I had to reapply the chalk. But it's been working just fine ever since.

One final note: On a recent trip to Walmart, I noticed that they too have no-see-ums crawling up and down the walls inside their main entrance! Seems like this whole town is a giant ant hill.

Last Update: June 2012