Can ants live under water? Well, it turns out they can. Why was I googling this? It was part of my science experiment. I hate ants, and a colony had moved into the pot where I sowed (had sown?) a whole packet of basil seeds last week. It's possible they were already living in the dirt but otherwise those buggers moved fast.

An aside ...is that not the most beautiful hibiscus ever? I love the clear yellow and white. It's now in a pot in the yard, I'm hoping it thrives and blooms profusely.

That was a little repite from the nasty subject of ants.

So, I want to eat this basil thus I resisted the urge to spray the hell out of it with Raid. I'm not fond of nasty little ant feet and spit on my food though.

My next solution was to put the whole pot under water and watch the little buggers swim for the surface. Heh! That amused me for a bit. "Oh, you made it to the surface? Now you get squished!" Did I mention that I really, really HATE ants?

After an hour under water I pulled the pot out and started watching it. Every half hour I'd pick it up and kill another dozen ants. Once, I got a really big one, hopefully the queen and mother of them all. At some point I came in to google it ...depressing.

I've been doing a lot of planting, in the pond and in pots. I am also enjoying living around the corner from blocks of flower stores, I am indulging my belief that you should always have flowers in the house.

Also spending a lot of time watching the mollies swim around and trying to count them. I thought we'd lost one of the silver ones when I found it in the screen of the pump well, it moved when I poked it though and swam off slowly when I put it back in the pond. We didn't see it for a day but there are 10 of them swimming around again so it survived. We bought some screen to keep any more from beaching themselves.

The Rainbow Mollies are not as brave, so far the most we've seen at once are 8 and there were 10 of them originally as well. I think they are hiding in the rocks but I can't be sure. The little buggers are hard to take a picture of, but there are 2 silver and 1 Rainbow in the pic above.

Tita is fascinated by the fish. This is probably not a good thing but it is funny to watch her watch them. So far, she hasn't really tried to catch one and they have a lot of places to hide. It's definitely kitty TV though.