Originally published by The Clifton Courier, September 2, 2020

I’ve been having trouble with ants lately. 

The little stinkers have been getting into my honey, even though it was stashed in a clean jar with no drips and stashed up high in a kitchen cabinet.

I mean, they’ve getting pouncing on the odd crumb here and there, but they seem to have a radar specifically geared towards detecting the location of my honey.

And this hurts.

I use honey instead of sugar for my tea and I really, really love a good cup of tea. Like, to the point that I’ll let out one of those deep, throaty groans you might expect to hear in a low-budget romance movie when taking my first sip. I get particularly vocal after a long day at work, something my housemate has become acutely aware of in recent months since his working-from-home office is just metres away from the kitchen.

I mean, I’ll have sugar in my tea in a pinch, but it’s just not as good. 

So I have to protect the honey I have. Because it’s not just any old store-bought, comes-from-a-squeezy-bottle honey. It comes in three kilo buckets from Warwick. 

It’s the good stuff.

I can’t get it at my local supermarket; I have to secure my supply of this highly valuable substance from a long-term fruit-and-veggie-distributing associate and make a special trip to pick up the goods from my dealer/mother. 

At the moment I’m wary of visiting her because the tough little nugget has already had more than enough trips to the hospital and, in These Uncertain Times, I’m even more wary of the filth I expose her to (in this case, I’m referring to the coronavirus, but “filth” could also be linked to my previous taste in music, cheap perfume that somehow smelled like a sugary migraine and, let’s be honest,  the things that come out of my mouth in general).

So when I get my hands on good honey, it becomes one of my most-valuable assets.

And when ants get into said precious resource, it’s a big problem. 

Like, I know they’re only insects but they’re infesting my food source, an invasion of which should be interpreted as nothing less than an open act of war. 

I mean, a rogue crumb on the bench is unclaimed and therefore fair game. But to mount a covert operation to sneak into a cabinet to pillage my supplies crosses a line. There’s no peace treaty or mutually-agreed border deals both parties have signed, but they know what they’re doing.

So when I saw them all over the honey jar the other day, I unleashed fury. 

I rinsed them off in the sink and erased their supply lines with a disinfectant spray and a damp cloth. 

But then I was hit by a wave of guilt. 

Maybe it’s because I’m a deeply empathetic, caring person with a compassionate spirit or maybe it’s because my housemate was watching Antz last week, but I couldn’t help by think about the devastation I’d inflicted on the ants. I mean, the disinfectant I had was basically vanilla-scented metho and even though it smelt lovely, drowning in a glob of the stuff would be less than pleasant. And being washed down a dark and slimy drain was a death sentence that is truly the stuff of nightmares.

I stared down into the sink as the mangled ant corpses and felt like a monster. 

After all, they were only trying to feed their ant families.

But, more importantly, I feared what would happen if the other ants saw the destruction. What if, instead of collecting food, they focused their efforts on bloody, pincer-y revenge and joined forces together with other colonies in the area to launch a reprisal attack?

I mean, one or two ants biting your armpit would be unpleasant but not deadly, however, it’s worth considering the estimated ant to human ratio is one million ants to one human (well, according to the first answer that came up on Google). I mean, if they put their minds to it, they could potentially takeover the world. 

So, wracked with my constant companions of guilt and fear, I decided to try to be a more benevolent enemy. 

I decided to keep the honey in the fridge, because I had to protect what was mine, but I vowed to no longer rinse my foes down the drain. And when I saw a bunch of them picking a bit of egg yolk I dropped into the sink I kept my word. I let them be and found I had a much easier job of cleaning the mess after they’d taken their share.  

Hopefully, the colony noted my mercy and resolved to stand down any attacks. Because I think the last thing we need this year is for humanity to be overpowered by ants.