ant-agonist

A tree may grow in Brooklyn, but two trees grow in my patio.

Two Queen Anne Palms, to be exact. Or cocos palms as my Mexican neighbors might say.

Native to South America, horticulturalists have toted Queen Anne palms around the world as a standard landscape tree. From parks in Australia to backyards in Scottsdale, its straight trunk and almost lacy fronds make great bones in architectural landscaping.

When I first saw the house I now own, I was first impressed with its Barragánesque lines. But it did not take me long to focus on the two Queen Anne palms that acted as sentries on each side of the stairway to the upper terrace. The lines and the palms perfectly complemented one another.

Then the troubles started. Trees are wild things. We only borrow them from nature -- doing our best to control or geld them. But they have ways of their own. And some of those ways are messy.

All trees drop things. In the case of the palms, it was flower stems that quickly turned into hefty seed pods (bring forth the guillotine). Then it was dead fronds. And a non-ending menagerie of scorpions, spiders, and cockroaches that would rain down on passersby during our not-infrequent winds.

Now and then, I need to pull out my limb lopper to clean up the frond stems that leave the trunk looking like my shaving results on stay-at-home days. Let's be kind and call it scruffy.

About a month ago, I decided to trim up one of the palms (killing me softly). There were plenty of living things that tumbled out of the frond stems when I pulled them from the trunk. But one insect surprised me. Longhorn crazy ants.

They are an interesting species. Instead of following the usual in-line formation of most ants, they dash around in what appears to be an erratic fashion. I would occasionally see them in the patio and very infrequently in the kitchen.

They are opportunity nesters. That means they do not need to build elaborate nests for their colony. A pile of leaves. A plastic bag. A plant. Anything that will provide partial protection for their eggs is worthy of an antly better home and garden certification.

I found their nests in almost every frond stem on the tree. And they ended up hurtling to the ground. Being survivors, they gathered up their young and scurried off to find new quarters without any concern from me.

I should have been more attentive. Some of those new quarters have included my kitchen and my bedroom. I found ants in my bed every night for five days until I decided to lift the mattress. They had built a small nest under it.

Almost everywhere I look I find them now. Especially after making more of them homeless yesterday when I cleaned off the trunk of the other palm.

Ants have always fascinated me. They are God's clean-up crew. When other insects die in the patio, their corpses are quickly carted off to feed the ant young. If someone leaves a speck of food on the kitchen counter, the helpful ants will perform a cleanup on aisle 2.

They do not bite or sting. Whenever I wander through one of their foraging crews on the patio, they will cover my feet and legs, but be quickly on their way.

I never owned an ant farm. I don't know why not. I am certain my parents would have sprung for one had I asked -- or I could have bought one with my grade school lawn-mowing money.

Maybe I did not settle for an ant farm because we had something better in our semi-rural neighborhood. About three blocks from my house was a field of an acre or two that would occasionally flood. It was populated with hundreds of anthills about a foot high that were designed to protect the colony from The Wet Times.

I would stop by regularly when I was supposed to be collecting money for my newspaper route. The ants were far more interesting. I would carefully break open a small portion of the hill to watch the ants at work -- especially the Barney Fife types who would show up to defend against the intruder.

The breaking was not malicious. I had friends who loved toppling the hills and then stomping the ants to death. I suppose my intrusion was of the same kind but only smaller in scale. But I like to think of myself as the James Audubon of ants. (Considering how the New Puritans who wish to cleanse history have taken on his memory, I am happy to carry the comparison.)

So, here I am in Mexico surrounded by the insects I have always admired.

It is well that I like them so much because I certainly now have enough of them to last several lifetimes.