Sunday January 4, 2015 Real Bugs in HP Printers

This week I went to our HP Office jet 4500 Printer/Scanner to copy a document and when I lifted the scanner cover the area under the screen was full of brown ants carrying around big white eggs.

I checked around the printer no ants to be found, they were contained in the area under the scanner plate.

On a whim, I put Ants in HP printer into a Google search and to my surprise a number of hits came back all with the same symptoms ants with eggs under the scanner screen.

 

HP Support Forums HP 8600A Plus Ants have set up home under glass

No Joke! Small Brown Ant colony under scanner glass

Hp laser jet 1020 ants problem?

Interesting thing is all of the pictures and videos the ants are the same. So it is unlikely the ants are domestic.

It looks to me like the ants may actually be an HP Bug.

The ants appear quickly with little warning and after you have had the printer for a while.

If you think about it since these printers are made off shore, tossing them in the land fill to be crushed will release this ant into the environment and who knows what effect these little guys might have.

So far no word from HP but it looks to me like HP may have a serious environmental problem. Kind of makes you wonder if someone on the assembly line is adding a few eggs for the fun of it or HP has found an interesting replacement motivator.

In any event the printer is effectively destroyed when the little guys hatch.

It's time for US Customs to pull some of these printers at the import point, open them up and check for infestation.

In the mean time, if you end up with one of these technological ant hills you might want to put the thing in a box and ship it back to HP. If they get enough of them, they will have to do something.

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