Of all the comments I have made since we arrived in Abu Dhabi nine months ago, perhaps the most laughably wrong went into this blog in November or early December.

I suggested Abu Dhabi didn’t seem to have many insects.

Ha. And double ha.

I have spent months now fighting invasions of gnats, followed by armies of ants, both small and smaller. With the occasional coackroach, housefly and hornet, just for variety.

It is the ants, however, that really have gotten my attention. And made me appreciate that insects apparently can live anywhere.

A few months ago, I believe I mentioned our gnat infestation. We had a few … and a week later, the Tiny Apartment was full of them.

They were living in the rotted wood beneath the kitchen sink. I looked up “gnats” online and, yep, they love to live in rotting wood.

We never really solved the problem, even though I regularly applied ammonia to the most infested area and spent a lot of time smashing them between clapping hands.

The gnats problem went unsolved … until the ants arrived.

Backing up for a second. When I made the blithe assertion that Abu Dhabi wasn’t very buggy, it was while we were living on the fifth floor of a hotel. And not even ants generally will walk that high to find food and water. I noted the city doesn’t have many house flies, and that remains true, even though the trash on the streets and open dumpsters would seem to be prime breeding grounds for flies. The city must spray. I was right about flies, anyway. Not many of them.

But the gnats … they disappeared quite quickly — once the ants moved into their/our home.

The ants out-competed the gnats. I am convinced of that.  They just took over the rotted wood, and settled in, and that was it for the gnats. The ants ate them out.

But then we had ants, based in the splintering wood propping up the sink.

We finally got the landlord to send over a carpenter who yanked out the rotten wood (I carried it to the trash myself; it was crawling with ants) and propped up the sink with four metallic/plastic supports about three inches high.

That did not deter the ants, however. They simply shifted their efforts from taking over the inside … to coming in from the outside.

The front door at the Tiny Apartment is not exactly capable of a hermetic seal. Actually,  a crack of about a quarter of an inch is left between the floor and the bottom of the door, and the ants just stroll in from the little patio whenever they please. Having originated, I suppose, in the yards of unmown grass/weeds just outside our exterior door.

Scouts prowl the apartment at all times, especially near the door, and we became even more concerned about not creating crumbs for them to eat.

Actually, I didn’t know what they wanted. Food? Water? Cool air? How do you get inside the mind of an ant?

At times, usually around midnight, they seemed to make sudden appearances in large numbers, and that’s when the Windex came out and I went medieval on them. I normally admire ants, hard workers and all, but you can’t let them take over a house.

So, bodies, everywhere, and Windex stains of the floors and walls … ugh.

Anyway, ants have some curious habits when it comes to other dead insects.

First, we noticed that on numerous occasions, ants found other dead insects … and carried them inside our place to be picked apart and (presumably) returned to the nest. The first time I saw a dead bee inside the house, I thought, “I don’t remember seeing a bee.” But after that … dead flies, dead caterpillars, dead rolly-pollys (or something similar) … all just inside the door with dozen of ants on them. I now am convinced: The ants brought them in to consume in a cooler place. How queer is that?

And their own dead. If I left behind hundreds of bodies near the front door … by morning they would all be gone. You think about “maybe they dried up and vanished?” … but eventually you see the ants carrying other dead ants, and you realize they recover their dead. I don’t think it’s for a decent burial; I’m guessing that the last service a worker ant provides to the community is to be lunch for someone else. Very curious.

The nature of the ants: Small and black. Not dissimilar from the little black ants of Southern California. But much quicker. If you try to stamp on one, they can evade your foot before it hits the ground. Speed aside, though, they didn’t seem particularly exotic. They didn’t bite.

Then came the new breed, about two months after the first. They are tiny ants. The smallest I’ve seen. About one-third the size of the black ants, and a sort of yellow-ish color. They don’t seem as big a threat, because they are so tiny … but they can be problems, too, when they suddenly are walking around the keyboard of your laptop or have somehow discovered the crack in a container of sugar on top of the pantry, six feet above the floor.

They also seem to have even more access points into the house. They literally can come through the smallest of cracks, and I have watched them do it. They came in through the holes in electrical outlets, after getting inside the walls.

Eventually, I taped up several electrical outlets, and some cracks in the ceiling, and covered the area around the rubber pipe that carries cold air to the AC blowers. The pipe didn’t quite fit the hole, and ants (large and small) were coming in there. A nice tape job slowed them, though.

Finally, we are at something of a balance of terror with the ants.  They have stopped coming in in great numbers. I do not see them swarming.

Truth be told, we have spent most of our time at another apartment for these past two weeks (more about that later), and maybe the very fact that we are not in the Tiny Apartment somehow makes it less interesting to ants?

I have visited there regularly, the past two weeks, and rarely seen ants in numbers inside. A few scouts … and that’s it. Do they know we’re gone? Could they smell us? Or was the place wetter (maybe) when we were there? Colder (actually, it was)?  Does our absence mean no teeny crumbs for them to eat?

Anyway, the ant problem is no longer a major concern. I don’t dream of them. But we’re now living, for a while, on the 14th floor of a building. I know I shouldn’t get too cocky about having beaten back the tiny invaders because all I did was move beyond their reach.

I imagine we will meet again, the ants and I, when we return to the Tiny Apartment. Here’s hoping winter keeps them out. A bit. When winter arrives here. If it does.