Ants attracted to clean clothes?

[Special K]

I opened my dresser drawer today and found a ton of small ants crawling all over one of my shirts. There were ants scattered around the entire drawer, but the vast majority of them were clustered on or around one particular shirt in the drawer. I don't understand what they were after - all of the clothes in the drawer had just been washed and dryed a couple days ago, and were neatly folded in the drawer. The shirt in question was an old sleeveless everlast workout tshirt - nothing really special about it.

I checked all of the other drawers of the dresser, but none of the ants were in any other drawer. They were only interested in this one particular shirt in one particular drawer. I had a stack of folded workout shorts on the other side of the drawer with the tshirt, but they didn't care about those at all.

I know there are a lot of bugs here and that ants are attracted to certain types of food, but I have no idea why this happened. Anyone ever experience anything like this before?

 

[Sea Moose]

perhaps it was a pink shirt. Real ants dont wear pink shirts

 

[PottedMeat]

Around here ants love dirty clothes - anything that had sweat on it, so maybe that particular shirt wasn't completely clean. Also is it very dry and hot outside? After a few days of high heat and no rain they invade the house.

 

[Special K]

Originally posted by: PottedMeat
Around here ants love dirty clothes - anything that had sweat on it, so maybe that particular shirt wasn't completely clean. Also is it very dry and hot outside? After a few days of high heat and no rain they invade the house.

That could be it - it's been over 100 for several days now IIRC. That's a pretty random place for them to invade though. I did a complete sweep of the apartment and couldn't find a trace of them anywhere else.

 

[cKGunslinger]

Dryer sheets, maybe? He have had similar incidents in the past - ants in freshly washed, folded clothes - nowhere else.

 

[Special K]

Originally posted by: cKGunslinger
Dryer sheets, maybe? He have had similar incidents in the past - ants in freshly washed, folded clothes - nowhere else.

I do use dryer sheets, but I remove them before I fold the clothes. Do they leave something behind that attracts ants?

 

[wiredspider]

a thin layer of basically fat and perfume.

 

[nakedfrog]

Mrs. Butterworth's is not a common laundry detergent.