UNCLE AL'S ANT BLASTER

The fully realized bachelor living within his bachelor pad often suffers from the malaise of not washing the dishes for three or four weeks at a time. A service for eight goes through 82.5% of its inventory, and then that last plate, fork and glass seems to hang in there forever. The sink can get mighty ripe as this situation evolves, and it is not altogether a shock to discover one morning that ten thousand hungry ants have found a new larder. Even the extreme step of finally washing the dishes must wait for the extirpation of the six-legged invaders from the garden.

Back in the old days before I had acquired the godhead of high technology, able to hurl lightning bolts of knowledge at the dark portals of ignorance, I often used commonplace poison to splat the little devils. Synthetic analogs of chrysanthemic acid esters, the beloved pyrethroids of the bug chemist, are extraordinarily toxic to insects (except roaches - it just gets them high) and all but non-toxic to mammals who degrade the molecule in a snap, namely us. It was most satisfactory to waft a perfunctorily sprayed cloud of Arthropoda death and watch the victims wobble, writhe and succumb. RAID! As with all miracles, there were some problems,

1) The stuff smelled awful.

2) The little corpses were draped all over the dirty dishes, making the trauma of dishwashing that much worse.

3) The queen ant, the lady responsible for maybe half a million or more offspring during her fecund life, was untouched and still laying eggs.

I have always believed that revenge is a serious undertaking, hence the eventual formulation of Uncle Al's Ant Blaster. To date, Ant Blaster has blown the chromosomes out of ant colonies in San Diego, Orange County, the San Gabriel Valley, Riverside and San Berdoo. As many happy home owners and septic apartment dwellers will vouch (with apologies to Heinlein),

With an ugh! and a groan and a kick of the heels,
Death comes quiet, or it comes with squeals,
But the surest route to blast them away
Is to really screw up their DNA.

Ant Blaster is a hell spawned (actually East Lansing, Michigan spawned, but the differences are too small to matter) brew of the finest clover honey and just a bit, about 2% by weight, of a powerful intercalcating DNA frame shift mutagen. You lay the stuff out on a sheet of plastic wrap in a dark, lonely corner and wait.

Soup's on! The first scout ant finds a square foot of drops of honey. She runs back to the colony to spread the word, and a couple of friends run back to check it out. Within an hour or two a frenzied hen party erupts with thousands of worker ants, all half-sisters and daughters of the queen ant, tanking up on the richly wholesome badness of Ant Blaster. Marvel as their little behinds swell up and a nine lane highway of the enemy waddles back to the nest.

Ants have a communal stomach, everybody sharing everything as food brought back to the colony eventually makes its way, mouth to mouth, down from the workers to the larvae and finally to the queen herself. Worker ants have almost no cellular reproduction, and Ant Blaster takes weeks to have any deadly effect upon them. Several ounces of Ant Blaster may be consumed, little six-legged vacuum cleaners gorging on honey, saturating the entire colony. It is silly to kill the workers when they are so willing to work for you.

The ant larvae have tremendous rates of cellular reproduction and DNA synthesis. They are fed and they die. The queen has a stupendous rate of DNA synthesis, making eggs and whatnot. She dies. Any eggs that hatch into larvae are fed, and quickly die. Any pupae that hatch into workers are fed, and die. The workers die. At the end of a week or two you will notice that no more ants show up to eat the remaining Ant Blaster. That is because there are no more ants.

Remember, that's Uncle Al Labs, home of Ant Blaster, Roach Assassin, Termite Terrorist, Flea Executioner and, coming this spring, Uncle Al's Lawyer Bane (where the robber hits the road).

To return to Uncle Al Outrage Central, click here
To view something awesomely strange...