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And yes, the thing about ant baits does come from personal experience. The warm weather (which is supposed to come to an abrupt halt tonight) has brought the annual inward migration of the sugar ants. Following the logic of The Lobster Hypothesis, the ants seem to be figuring out these ant baits are bad news and learning to avoid them more each year, usually by infesting places not amenable to the instructions on the bait packs. Putting the baits against a wall does not do a lot of good if the ants are nowhere near a wall.

I really am long overdue giving a giant Tip o' The Beak to Emp. Peng. He puts up with an amazing amount of weirdness from me. More than occasionally, I turn The Rookery into an amateur science lab, and he lets out nary a peep about my experiments. When I was testing the effectiveness of cinnamon on ants, he walked in on me dusting cinnamon over half the kitchen counter around the coffeemaker, and did not even blink. Nor did he blink at my controlled experiment testing the hypothesis that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar (not true--at least with fruit flies). He did not question why I was drilling holes in the bottom of our old paper shredder bin (it makes a nice planter). I even organized the pantry in ascending order by processing level and he went along with it. When I started turning the back quarter of The Rookery's lot into a one-penguin agrarian operation, his only request was "no livestock." He doesn't (seem to) mind that a component of our home decor is made of duct tape or that the bottom crisper drawer is a holding pen for soon-to-be-compost. I could go on, but you get the picture. He deserves more than a Tip o' The Beak, really, for putting up with the mad scientist in his castle.