I really do hate using my entymology powers for evil.

Yet, I have been waging a war out my front door on an ant colony as they wreck havoc upon a beautiful and otherwise-thriving plum tree I’ve been trying to grow in my front yard.

Let’s back up.

We’ve been in our house for twenty years, and one would assume that roughly nineteen years since completing the landscaping around that new-build home we should have had time to grow a maginificent tree of some sort in the front yard.

Most of our neighbours have trees that tower as tall as or much taller than their roof lines, granting shade and a sense of maturity to the property.

My tree is only about two meters tall, spindly and could use another decade before I consider it a success. Why? Because it is the third tree I’ve attempted to grow in that spot. The previous two perished because of, frankly and humbly, my presumptions about my own ability to thwart the climate in which I live—and too, that Home Depot is an asshoel for selling trees to people who don’t check closely enough these things in their local nurseries that are not rated for our climate zone.

On about six year cycles I’ve had to replant, tend, try to rescue, and eventually remove the two previous attempts at a front yard tree. And most recently, in 2020 (I remember this because it was in the peak of the pandemic’s first summer) I found a plum tree in a pot, ready for transplant, similar if not identical to the one thriving in my neighbours backyard, rated for our climate zone, and I bought it and planted it in the hole from which I’d just dug the remains of the last stump.

Fast forward to twenty-twenty five and past four bitter winters and a couple years of light but successful plum harvests from this young tree… and to me noticing that a lot of the leaves were curling up this year and—oh shit—the ants, I suspect a species likely lasius neoniger, had infested it and had built some kind of critter farm filled with hungry little insects and webby, silky, munching aphids turning entire branches into a tree apocalypse affecting about a third of the host organism. They were killing my third tree. 

Here we go again.

Or…

My last week has been spent trying to rout the invasion.

Diatomacious earth powdered upon the ground.

Insecticides on the leaves to curb the livestock explosion.

Bait traps seeded around the colony in hopes of poisoning the queen.

And, most rudimentary, spirals of sticky tape twisted around the trunk face out to capture hundreds of drone workers and glue them to their doom. 

I studied entomology in university. I often tell people it was an unofficial minor in my science degree—unofficial because I never took the time to declare it—and I could have, should have gone on to do something with that because I love insects, particularly the eusocial ones like ants who I used to rave to anyone who would listen about the fascinating properties of ants who did agriculture. 

I mean, I just don’t want it in my tree, in my front yard, wrecking my stuff. A bit nimby of me, sure, but I’ve got property values to think of, right? And, I mean, what a waste.

So I sit here writing this, drinking my coffee, and thinking with the backburner thoughts of a guy preoccupied by a problem what my next move in the battle is going to be.

Those ants outnumber me for sure, but I won’t let them outsmart me.