The ants invaded Courtenay Sanchez’s bedroom under cover of darkness.
When the Boston University student got home late one night and flipped on the lights, there they were: hundreds of them, pouring through an open window and feasting on a cookie she’d left on the bed, crawling over her sheets and scaling her walls.
Armed with a bottle of Lysol, she tried to beat back the miniature army.
“I was just like, DIE DIE DIE!” said Sanchez, 20 — but by morning they were still coming. “These suckers are pretty resilient.”
All over drought-plagued New England, ants are marching into houses and apartments, congregating in kitchen sinks and staging tiny town hall meetings in toilets. The hot, dry weather has driven down their numbers, entomologists say, but it’s also driven those that remain indoors as they search for water.
“It’s stressing them out,” said Jonathan Boyar, owner of Ecologic Entomology, a Boston pest control company. And just like the rest of us, he said, ants need water — a need met by scouring your kitchen for moisture.
“People will call and say they have a dishwasher full of ants,” Boyar said. “They’ll come home and there will be ants just sitting in the sink or bathtub.”
But as any horrified homeowner who has reached for a can of Raid discovers, these ants can’t really be sprayed away. In the long game that ants play, blasting them with insecticide can actually make them stronger.
“When you’re dealing with those smaller ants, you don’t want to spray them,” said Galvin Murphy, president of Yankee Pest Control in Malden and an associate certified entomologist. Pharaoh ants, a tropical species that can thrive indoors in New England, do something called budding when sprayed, he said, splitting off from their queen and forming smaller satellite colonies.
When people call Murphy’s firm about pharaoh ants, “we try to talk them out of doing something,” he said, beyond “maybe an extra cleaning in the kitchen.” Instead, ant bait products — poison disguised as food, that foot soldiers take back to their colonies — can be much more effective than sprays.
Murphy said ant calls around the region are actually down quite a bit this summer compared to previous years. This is because the same drought that has sent ants scurrying across floor tiles has stopped the onslaught of the only kind of ant that can do any real damage.
Many of the calls firms usually get are for carpenter ants, which seek out moisture in wood, and then set about destroying trees and houses. But given that homes all over New England are drier than kindling right now, the carpenter ants are mostly minding their own business.
Instead, harmless survivors — pharaoh ants, pavement ants, little black ants — crawl inside, in search of water that they store up and bring back to their colonies. From that perspective, “ants are just trying to make a living,” said Stefan Cover, a curatorial assistant at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.
“You can look on this activity with a kindly eye. I do. They’re helping out their family.”
Cover curates the ant collection, which the museum calls “the largest and most important ant collection in the world,” and has traveled the country collecting specimens and doing field work. He said nobody has ever undertaken a count of all the ants in the museum’s collection — it would take forever and at the end all you’d have is a really big number of ants — but he said it’s surely somewhere between 500,000 and a million.
His fascination with ants has spanned decades, and the occasional ant ambling across his countertop is no cause for alarm. “They’re not disgusting or dirty,” said Cover. “They spend an enormous amount of time cleaning themselves. More than humans.”
Cover called “the traditional model of how people interact with nature” — it’s fine outside but keep it out of my house — absurd.
“There are hundreds of different invertebrates that live inside your house,” Cover said. “They’re your neighbors. Just because you’re not aware of them, doesn’t mean they’re not there.”
Few are so magnanimous.
“This summer it’s been particularly bad,” said Paul Mena, whose kitchen in Cochituate has been the target of a near-constant onslaught.
“We’ve set up some ant traps,” Mena said. “Nothing seems to work except squashing them,” which he noted presents a problem of scale: He could stomp all day and the world would keep making more and more ants.
Instead, he’s adopted a more Zen approach. He wrote a free-form haiku, which he shared on Twitter:
hot summer morning --
sharing my breakfast
with ants
Nestor Ramos can be reached at nestor.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @NestorARamos.