The title just about says it all. She was sitting on the wooden porch as brazen as can be. I’m usually very tolerant of spiders, but she was squashed under my shoe. But now I’m worried - where there’s one, there are probably more. And in my big old farmhouse there are plenty of places to hide.
Should I bomb the house? Should I bomb under the wooden front porch? My cats and dogs like to sit on the porch, and I like to swing on my porch swing. It’ll be cold enough soon to kill all the bugs and spiders (outside, at least), but Spring will come eventually.
Um, do you have any idea how laid back black widow spiders are? I’ve had my hand within six inches of a nest, and the spider just looked at me like, “Um, chick, I’m cool with you sitting there and all, but do me a favor and don’t, like, stick your hand in my web, 'cause I really don’t want to have to bite you, 'kay?” We’ve had a black widow living under the stairs of my apartment building all summer, and she just kind of hangs out and doesn’t bother anybody.
Really, a check of nooks and crannies around the house (and in beds, especially if they’re in a spare room that doesn’t get used much) might be a good idea, but I wouldn’t worry too much. Las Vegas is practically crawling with black widows, (I’m not kidding- walk along any fence or wall on a warm summer evening, you’ll see one about every four feet, hanging in its cobweb) but bites seem to be pretty rare.
They’re not an aggressive spider. Leave 'em alone, they’ll leave you alone.
I don’t know for sure how non-agressive they are, but I used to feed the one’s at work and they never tried to make any kind of a run at me.
Arye you sure it’s a Black Widow? We’ve got a harmless cellar spider up here that does a pretty good Widow immitaiton. In fact, we keep one at the zoo so we can show people the difference. Widows are a very glossy black, smaller than their reputation would make you expect and of course, they have the red hourglass on their belly. Cellars are browner and a bit shorter in the front legs.
I used to have a HUGE wolf spider living on my porch. He and I co-existed peacefully (I spend a lot of time on the porch, it’s more like a lanai or outdoors room).
One night some friends were over, and while I was in the kitchen fetching another round, I heard a commotion outside on the porch. One of my friends came inside and told me proudly that they had killled “the biggest spider you ever saw”. My heart sank - they had squished old Wolfie flat as a pancake.
ZooGirl - She wasn’t a big spider and was very glossy and very black. I took a good long look at her before I did away with her. Her red hourglass (more like two triangles meeting at their apexes) was on her back, though. Maybe it wasn’t a black widow? I live in Tennessee, which is brown recluse territory, but I know we have black widows, too.
Mango - I used to have huge garden spiders that were like pets and one spider that built a web like a funnel and he’d hide in the bottom. if you gently jiggled the web he’d come out to see if he’d caught anything.
I like spiders. I really do. I just don’t want venomous ones around.
I believe there are several spiders in the Widow family. It sounds like she was indeed one of 'em.
Brown recluses have a mark like a violin and are sometimes called Fiddlebacks. They hang out in the grass at the bottom of walls and fences. I haven’t actually seen one, but I think they’re kind of a dull brown and bigger than a Widow. Apparently we’ve got them up here too, along with Hobo’s.
Thanks for reminding me that my mother is going to visit in a week or so. She always leaves the front door open to let in the warm October sun. And the black widows, which are seeking shelter from the approaching winter.
I’ve come to accept that there are more black widows out here than there are humans (and some people keep them as pets!) but the ones that come into the house get weeded out of the gene pool.
I dunno if it was a black widow or not, but that doesn’t matter to the advice I’m going to give.
If you want to keep spiders away, nothing beats diligent sanitation in the areas where they are likely to live, such as attics, basements and crawlspaces.
Spiders construct their webs very quickly. People are amazed that the intricate spiral pattern can appear literally overnight, but they shouldn’t be. That’s where the spider lives and how it catches its food. They can’t afford to dawdle.
So arming oneself with a broom that has the business end wrapped in paper towels and periodically sweeping away all the dust and cobwebs in the above-mentioned locales (among others, use your eyes and your imagination to figure out where they’re likely to be) will keep the environment shook up enough to make the spiders figure they would be better off somewhere else.
The above technique also has the advantage of sweeping away the pill-sized egg cases, which, needless to say, is a boon in keeping the future spider population to a minimum.
We killed a black widow in our backyard once and another time when I was young I caught one and kept it in a jar and one day I looked at it and noticed its abdomen was all shriveled and it was dead and had given birth to a bunch of babies and I think I threw them out somewhere. I don’t know how common they are hear I’ve only seen those 2 in my life and one time I saw a tiny scorpion on our mantelpiece, which I though was odd. :eek:
I opened the front door the other night and walked right into one at chest level. It was the smaller brown male version, but I wasn’t too happy about it anyway. It’s time to do spider patrol - I go out at night with a flashlight to catch them active, and blast them with bug spray.
I have no problem with other spiders - just yesterday and very nice black dot jumping spider was watching me on the computer. I left him alone. But the widows creep me out.
I have a very large common orb weaver living on my back porch. The web is in a perfect place: a corner between the first post and the overhang, above the rail. The spider catches bugs coming in for the porch light but the overhang is deep enough that the birds on the roof can’t quite get underneath to pluck the spider out of her web. An acrobatic bird might be able to pull it off midflight, but it would be an impressive feat.
And yes, one of my favorite things to do lately is go out late at night and watch the spider reworking part or all of her web. For whatever reason, this spider likes to be active after 11pm, which is odd, because it seems like it’d be too cold for her. I went out to check last weekend around 2am and there she was, busily spinning away. Maybe she gets such high bug traffic during the day due to the perfect location that midnight is her only good opportunity for weaving. But it’s true that by the morning, the web is shipshape again, ready for a day of catching insects and sucking out their precious bodily fluids.
She’s gorgeous, too. The commonest sort of garden spider around these parts, but I’ve never seen one so big. Golden-brown body, intricate white pattern on the back, and truly impressive leg spines. All of this detail is visible now because of her size. Presuming nothing untoward happens to her, how big can she get, really?
I haven’t named her yet. I’m considering “Vivian.”
Mosquitoes & flies bother me a lot more than Black Widows. Mosquitoes & flies are far more likely to make me sick from something they’re carrying. Black Widows eat mosquitoes & flies. Therefore, Black Widows are welcome on my property.
Really, Black Widow venom is so precious to them, they try very hard to avoid wasting it on anything but prey.
They’re also not the type of spider to insist on building a web in one place and one place only. If she’s not welcome on your porch, you could gently brush her away with a broom, and she’ll move her web someplace safer.
I also happen to think the danger to you & your pets from bug-bombing everything is greater than the odds of ever getting bitten by a Widow. Not only that, but bombing everything isn’t going to kill them all. Many of them will become alarmed and/or sick. I wouldn’t want to live in a house where I just made dozens, if not hundreds of Black Widows alarmed, sick and suddenly on the move to find new places to build nests.
Sorry, didn’t mean to alarm you. Widows don’t so much hang out in your house, as around the area of your house, i.e. the garage, backyard, etc. When I lived in Sacramento, I could find dozens living in the garage, back yard wood pile, etc. I figure if I could find dozens, there were probably many more I couldn’t find.
But not in the house.
But then again, if you spray outside your house, they gotta go somewhere.
Please, oh please, don’t stress about black widows. I live in NC and I see black widows all the time around my house. The only time I move or killl them is if they are in a position that my husband or sons might inadvertantly touch it. Unless you are very old, very young, allergic or in some way immuno-compromised, a bite is going to be very, very painful but not fatal. But you really have to convince a the spider to bite you. And, BTW, anyone with mud dauber wasps, another species that people complain about, may also have black widow. Mud daubers use spiders as food for their young.
I do not understand why people get so bent out of shape about risks that are so vanishingly small yet they will get fat, stay sedentary, drive w/o a seat belt, etc. and turn nary a hair. But a small, helpful spider on their property causes a huge case of hysterical concern.
We have a good many black widow spiders around here and unfortunately they are quite fond of living underneath our porches. I am incredibly skeeved out by spiders but I am trying to ease my fear of them little by little. I am terrified of them but they fascinate me.
This summer, we had a huge, beautiful orb weaver (writing spider) who lived on our backdoor–quite literally–she’d spun her web from corner to corner on the window. She was quite interesting to watch from the other side of the glass. It amazes me how tidy and efficent spiders are. She’d catch a small bug for lunch, wrap it up in a neat little package, store it in the upper part of her web, repair the broken spot where it had gotten caught, and then go take a nice, long nap in the corner. Or at least that what I imagined she was doing up there. I guess she got tired of the web-quakes we caused going in and out the door all the time because she recently moved to a nice spot beside the porch and now has a big egg sack hanging in her web.
I am trying to adopt the attitude of "They don’t bother me, I don’t bother them"about spiders.
However, I will advise that if you notice a very tiny, harmless spider hanging around above the showerhead in your tub and decide to let her stay there because she is so tiny and harmless, you might want to evict her before she has time to make an egg sac. If you don’t you run the risk of opening the shower door one day and being greeted by a spider web blanket of thousands of tiny baby spiders across your face.
Oh, my heart sinks whenever I squish one…mostly because I have to clean them off the wall. I usually get a wide mouthed cup, slip one of those magazine subscription cards (I KNEW I’d have a use for those someday…) and take it outside. Then I squish it. I got bitten badly on my leg before and a bitten by a Hobo Spider multiple times when it got caught in my shirt. Since they look the same to me, they all get the shoe.
Last week, I forgot I vacuumed one up so when I opened the canister to clean it out, it ran up my arm. I had to re-vacuum of course since I dropped the whole thing and ran. Another time, one was waiting for me in my sock bin and ran up the sleeve of my sweatshirt. I then ripped it off and ran outside screaming. So there I am, in my bra, running all over my deck. The first time with the vacuum, only my dogs were around, the later time, there were some nurses in the yard next door to watch the fun.
