WARNING: The following is NOT a product endorsement. If I were to endorse a product, I'd expect to get paid for it. And if I got paid for it, I'd lose not only my credibility as a no-holds-barred columnist, but probably my job itself. So, in order to make up for the loss of my job, I'd have to get paid so much for endorsing a product that I'd be rich enough to maintain a lifestyle to which I hope one day to become accustomed. And you don't get paid that much money unless you are a sports figure endorsing shoes or a woman who had sex with a famous politician endorsing "No Excuses" jeans. Have ants?
Become a Terro-istYou don't get that much money for saying that a product that kills ants does a pretty good job. At least, I've never seen Michael Jordon or Gennifer Flowers pushing ant poison. Ergo, I am NOT, definitely NOT, endorsing the product about to be mentioned.
First, a little history.
Not long ago, I wrote about a plague of ants that had been running roughshod over The Hale Memminger Rancho Estate. Specifically, there were three distinct ant genre -- if I may use that term. There were the large, carpenter ant loners who wandered around like Shane, crossing a vast desert of carpet looking for a friendly western town. Then there were your regular old black ants, which form long supply trails that meander around the house. And then there were the tiny little blighters who scamper around on the kitchen cabinets gangland style, conducting crawl-by gnawings on any iota of food.
Nothing I had used could stop the ant onslaught for more than a few hours. And since I didn't want to keep coating the kitchen counters with Raid, I had begun shellacking the kitchen with 409 spray cleaner.
I received tons of e-mail after that column ran. And when you consider how much one e-mail weighs (how much does one micron of light weigh?), that's a lot of e-mail. And most of it suggested I try a product called "Terro."
I've lived in Hawaii most of my life and have never heard of Terro. So I figured it couldn't be much good. But I got it. It comes in a little plastic bottle. And what you do is rip off a little square of cardboard from the box it is sold in, squeeze a healthy drop of Terro on the paper and place it in the line of ants.
The reaction is amazing.
At first the ants just ignore it. Then one or two taste it. Then they get real excited, like they've just seen the ant equivalent of Madonna, and start running crazy-like. You come back about a half-hour later and there are gaggles of ants gathered around the drop of Terro. It looks kind of like the view from an airplane of a pond on the Serengeti ringed by animals standing shoulder-to-shoulder drinking.
The ants then apparently take the deadly stuff back to their nest or wherever they are hanging out for the day and the Terro wipes them out. Aside from the mini-genocidal aspects of the operation, it's pretty cool.
The Terro got rid of the tiny ants and the black ants. The large carpenter ants just sort of stood back and laughed.
It says on the box that Terro is only for "Sweet Eating" ants. That doesn't mean the ants are "sweet eating," like "sweet eatin', finger lickin' good." It means they are the kind of ants that like to eat sweet stuff. Any ant that likes sweets is a sucker for Terro, which is basically Borax, sugar, water and other stuff.
So there you go. I'm not saying you should use Terro. In fact, any use of Terro without the expressed, written consent of the National Football League might be forbidden. (The NFL warning is the only legal warning I've memorized so I'm just throwing that out there to protect myself.)
Now, who out there knows how to get rid of cats?
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
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