Ants

Apparently, there are about 20 quadrillion ants on the planet, which is about 2.5 million per human.

It seems that all 2.5 million of mine have been coming to say hi to me. Quite a lot of them were in Sri Lanka. A number came with me to India. And then most of the rest were in the house in India.

Ants get into everything!

And biodegradable nappy bags, it seems, are particularly tasty. They ate their way through them. Plus, for some reason, they also ate their way through several of my zip loc plastic bags. And they got into every single corner of my water filter: the filter cartridge; the bit where the clean water lives; the bit where the dirty water sits; under all the rubber seals. They also got into my travel mug and ate bits of those rubber seals too. They loved the mac and cheese and chocolate that I had brought from the USA and that was unopened and in zip loc bags.

Then they got into my mattress. Which meant waking up several times each night with ant bites. And waking up several more times imagining there were ant bites. At least they aren’t vectors for dengue or malaria, unlike mosquitoes. But some ant bites do sting a bit when they bite and then some itch quite a lot for a few days afterwards. I had bites on my feet, my calves, my thighs, my stomach, my chest, my back, my hands, my arms, my shoulders, my neck, my chin, my cheeks, my eyelids, everywhere. And believe me, ants in your pants really are not fun!!

Several years ago, I got bitten by an ant in India on my forearm and my arm almost doubled in size and went bright pink. But some antihistamine cream, tablets and an injection calmed it down (note to self: when the doctor says are you ok with injections, don’t say yes, particularly if he then asks you to pull your trousers down – the glutes really are quite big muscles so are excellent for antihistamine injections from a medical point of view, less excellent from a human dignity point of view). This time, I had no such bad luck. Though one of the bites did result in a bright pink patch on my arm about the size of the palm of my hand.

There were two beds in my room and each had a single mattress, and each mattress had hundreds of ants. We put the mattresses out for a few days to try to get rid of the ants, so I slept on a wooden board for a few days. My exceedingly lovely host family did everything they could and offered to swap me into a different room with an ant-free mattress, but actually it was all fine. And putting the mattresses in the sun did work and I was back sleeping on an ant-free mattress.

Then the ants got into my laptop. I’d switch it on and watch 20 or so crawl out of the keyboard. Which of course meant that if I put my laptop in my bag, they’d get into my bag. So we found a computer shop and got them to open up my laptop and clean it out. The crumbs that were feeding the ants and the ants themselves (alive and dead).

There were about 5 different types of ants – the big brown ones, the big black ones, the little black ones, the medium sized black ones, the little brown ones. Probably lots of others, you can tell I’m not an entomologist!

It was mostly the little black ones that I had in all my stuff. The big brown ones were often downstairs on the floor, and again hundreds of them, a veritable carpet of them. Then they’d go away for several days, then reappear again.

I managed to leave them all in India, which was a relief. I was a bit worried they were going to come with me to Nepal. And the staff and volunteers on the All Hands & Hearts project there would absolutely NOT have been happy had I brought an entourage of the little guys with me!

I didn’t actually count them, but I hope all of my 2.5 million have now come to say hello and I won’t be in such close proximity to so many of them again in future. Next time guys, just send me a postcard or an email, no need to come and say hi in person (or in ant).