Amidst the muck, sweat, and everyday tasks on a feeding frenzy which constitute a day of summer cleanup at a City elementary school, there are other challenges. Standing in the weathered asphalt area behind the far flung bungalows, they turned to me and the guttural sound of protective behavior welled up, and I took aim.

At wasps, building their "lanterns" under the roof overhang for the larvae and all of us victims of a teacher who, despite the presence of seldom opened, thanks to air conditioning, windows opposite from the door side of her room felt these constituted a threat. And this area was fenced off from children.

Mentor just wrote in her blog about ants in the home and her admirable hesitance about pesticides. Back to school, the wasps were about to be lit up with, stretch fingers, shots of alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride. The disinfectant slash virucide often is marketed under fanciful names and surrounded by inert ingredients to give color and fragrance but while there are variations on the carbon exponents listed on the label it all comes to killing microbes.

And wasps. Once struck, they wilted and fell to the ground, legs frozen in the cargo grab position. The Board banned pesticides and the cleaner clammed up the yammering from this teacher, wife of a cop by the way, and others, when the tactical fighter planes of the insect world set up the nurseries.

But in the pesticide-free long-reponse-time-by-tradespeople principals who want things last month world, then there were the grease ants. The alkyl? They shook it off, not even being drowned in it.

At a Plant Manager meeting with a guest speaker from Pest Control I posed the question why, smeared in alkyl, one insect played dying swan and the other the indomitable Woody Woodpecker. Aha! Ask the question differently, he said: posit the critters got in the way of a cleaning application. Not that I ended up getting the question answered.

Folks who recommended red pepper for the ants also were told---no. Nothing is to be used as a pesticide. Don't bring it up.

Humans invented protocol and burn up resources and time heaving various examples of same back and forth, while the insects have known exactly what they want for eons.

Years ago I would have sworn I heard a remake of "Them" was in the works.