Is it just me, or is ant season more like an ant insurrection this year? For a while, it was the medium-sized ones, who succumbed successfully (I think I just jinxed myself) to a heavy-duty application of an insect spray of dubious chemical composition. This no doubt means I will not be inducted at the next Order of Canada ceremony for my environmental safety initiatives.
Now it’s the tiny ones that aren’t so much seen but leave swaths of black sand-like detritus on the windowsill that I dearly hope is not something that comes out of their nether regions. Every morning I vacuum it up and wipe the sill, and the next day I do it again. Sisyphus has nothing on me. Okay, maybe I don’t do it every morning, but I always intend to. Just like I intend to do several planks and wall-sits and one-footed squats and whatever other exercises the internet says I need to do to a mere fifty reps of daily to stave off the perils of aging. (I did the math on this, BTW. If I completed all the moves stipulated by the fitness influencer Facebook reels, it would take me 25 hours a day.)
But I digress. Since today was the first rainy day in a while (farmers are doing a happy dance), I busied myself inside, doing mostly food repurposing chores. This included turning some sad store-bought tomatoes that had gone squishy into slow-roasted nuggets of flavour (slice in half, into the oven at 275 degrees for two hours, give or take, FYI). Then I slipped off their skins, put them in a bowl and blitzed them with a hand blender. (Also FYI, use a much deeper bowl that you might first choose or your kitchen will look like the aftermath of an axe murder and your t-shirt will never be white again.)
Anyhow, exceedingly pleased with my thrift and ingenuity, I transferred the roasted pureed goodness to a container to use for tomorrow’s pizza, then moved over to the sink to wash the tomato bits off my fingers. That’s when I noticed something alarming.
The hummingbird feeder hangs from a hook on one of the porch pillars and is visible outside the kitchen window. I have lots of customers this year and am reasonably diligent at keeping the restaurant fully supplied. But something looked a little weird. Upon closer inspection, there was a raft of tiny ants floating on top of the liquid inside the feeder. I’m talking a bazillion of them. And I swear they were not there yesterday. I rushed out to rescue the feeder and save my establishment from a “red” health rating and the offending ant corpses went down the drain.
This particular feeder is a mason jar that screws upside-down into a two-part base: one part has the flower thingies where the hummingbird accesses the sugary goodness and the other is the bottom where the food seeps in from the main container. These click together. Keep this in mind.
I got out my largest measuring cup, added the requisite amount of water and sugar and stirred (and stirred and stirred) until the liquid was clear. I rinsed the mason jar component, poured the food into it (upside down), and screwed the bottom onto it (upside down). At this point, all the carefully emulsified liquid spewed out into the sink. (How clever I was to do this in the sink!) Turns out, I had only screwed on the bottom half of the base.
Back to square one on the hummingbird food. Back to a bad Yelp review for my avian restaurant. Just another summer day.