You can protect your food by putting it in the refrigerator. If an ant does get past the seal it will die in the cold. You can use sealing plastic containers, but the seal better be perfect and a temperature change better not pop the lid, like when you take one out of the refrigerator, or closed it in the cool of night. Ziploc bags are unreliable. The ants seem to chew through them much of the time. Some product bags may work. The basic rule is, if you cannot open it yourself without tools, they ants may not be able to get into it either. It is hard to rely on even this rule, however.

The answer seemed to be to put everything into the refrigerator. That is really inconvenient. It’s not possible when Sue is here stocking up in Korat every two weeks. The ant invasion solutions on the internet involve chemicals, sealing everything adequately, being able to seal off your house better than I can here, and maybe an assumption that the ants are not quite so ready or numerous as they are here.

All I needed to do was ask a Thai. I bought six small bowls for the six legs on my cheap aluminum kitchen cabinet. The legs sit in the bowls which are filled with water. The fifty cent blue pipe is needed to fill the back center bowl. It should take more than a month for the water to evaporate, and we can move everything into the refrigerator when we leave for the U.S.

I tested it by leaving the knife out on the counter top after spreading jam on toast. It was there for 24 hours and I did see one ant. It was not eating jam. It must have been looking for a way back to the nest. I theorize it fell from the ceiling. Now if they could learn to do that, and then go to the cabinet bottom and fall to the floor when they want to get off, I could be in trouble. They’ll have to evolve more before they can do that.

So now I have a big cabinet I can store any kind of food in or on. I’ll try to keep the doors closed in case something larger wants to munch, but I have seen no signs of anything like that yet.

Something did happen last night. There is some kind of small beetle, dark brown and shaped like a ladybird beetle but a quarter or less the size, that is mating, breeding or otherwise celebrating some part of their life cycle. This part appears to be to find a light and fly around within a foot of it until you die. This is a picture of my front porch. I had the porch light on for movie night and forgot to turn it off until later. They look like coarse brown dirt. This is the second and probably last die off I have seen this year. The first time I had five or more times as many insects. I should have taken a picture of my porch then. It was quite impressive. I did not realize what the “dirt” was and just started sweeping it away. They sweep up easily.

Few came in last night because there was no inside light to draw them (movie night, remember?). Thai houses don’t seal that well, and the night of the first time I did not understand what was happening. My inside, as well as outside, lights were on and a few got in. I was reading directly under a light and five or six times a little beetle just fell onto me. It could be dead or still crawling a bit. They don’t bite and you can’t feel them except when they first fall and hit you. When I was cleaning up next morning I noticed they were only on the dining and coffee tables in the house, nowhere else. The two lights were directly over these tables.

So if you are eating your evening meal at an outdoor restaurant (about the only kind we have) in Nang Rong and start getting bombed by tiny beetles, just move to a table between two lights, and you should not have any problem.