House Spiders
 

I was about to go to sleep and I saw a spider crawl from my sheets onto my laptop screen in this pitch blackness that is my room.

Now I'm freaking paranoid it might be a brown recluse which is a terrible spider and dangerous to bite. I don't remember, it was about 1.5 inches total length, light color brown/grey and didn't seem very fast.

Any home-owners have advice, know where to look/exterminate or...am I overreacting? I know spiders kill a lot of other nasty insects but I don't want any bugs in my room!

Almost all spiders bite, but they don't really eat that many bugs. I say squash him if you see him. If you want to control bugs in your house, keep a gekko, or a toad in your home.

Just whack it with a slipper. Try not to do it where it will make a splattered mess. Get some toilet paper to wipe up the mess right away. It's not a brown recluse.

He sounds cute to me. My advice is to call him 'Bob' and make him your friend.

"House Spider"? Does he have a limp, use a cane, and diagnose really odd-ball medical conditions?

I love Rhianne.
~~~~~~~~~

Its a tiny lil bug ... Kill it and smile as you drift off to dreamland.

I usually pick those up and take them outside. I've never had one bite me.

Brown Recluse (some images especially unpleasant).

Catch it and mail it to Rhianne. :haha:

House spiders are your friends. Ask yourself who else is patrolling your home for tasty bugs? spudcon's wrong. All they eat is bugs. Think how many bugs it takes to make 1.5 inches of spider? The spider couldn't care less about you--leave her alone.

In the interest of domestic felicity, I have, on occasion, escorted them outside. I have never been bitten.

According to this graph, there are no brown recluse in Chicago. So you're safe Fresh.

http://www.tricopest.com/pix/recluse_map.GIF

My bedroom visitor yesterday was one of those little gray jumping ones.

Generally spiders don't scare me, except the huge ones that live in my basement (Wolf spiders, I think) but spiders that jump? :::shudder:::

And yes, according to that map, we get Brown Recluses where I live. 'Tis true, I've seen em.

Did I ever show you guys the cutie I saw on vacation while walking at dusk?

Did you put it in your pocket?

Our house is full of spiders, we like them, they're beautiful creatures. Send him here if you like and we'll make him feel at home.

That map is false. We absolutely, positively, veritably, have them in PA now.

We've got them in northern NY, I know two people who've been bitten.

have them here, too, which does not show on the map. badmap! bad!

I haven't seen a spider since my last post...but I think about the zombie skin from Brown Recluse bites...nasty...

They shoveled steroids down my throat when I was bitten. I had seven little ragged rotten holes surrounded by 'zombie skin', but, nothing like the great chasms of rotting flesh you hear about with some of the recluse horror stories. Definitely had the red, white, blue effect; redness around the general bite area, white, flaky dying skin directly around a blue/black hole of rotting flesh at the bite itself.

Agreed. And we've had them for some time. I have two friends who had brown recluse bites (one in South Philly, one in Havertown), both of whom ended up needing to have the wounds debrieded multiple times to try to outrace the necrotization from the bites.

It's never a Brown Recluse...

You swallowed it in your sleep.

Spiders live OUTDOORS. Anything in the house that's not paying rent gets killed or thrown out. (good policy generally, and applies to lazy-ass boyfriends as well)

We have had about 10 or more in the last week. They are huge, quarter dollar sized.( probably only quarter sized) Day before last one crawled into my sons shirt while he was sitting at the PC. He crushed it before it bit, so the next day I went to get some spider traps. The woman at the hardware store asked me if I really want to kill them. wtf! No, lady, I am not talking about a little itsy bitsy spiders. sheesh!

The traps are still left unopened. If I had a spider crawl up my shirt I would have all four traps around my perimeter.


basically what I told the lady at the hardware store

Are there really more spiders in Autumn?
I remember asking this before (probably not here) and being told - no, they just come inside with the colder weather. Rubbish, sez I. Walking to school and round to Grandad's, I am seeing webs everywhere I look.

But then - is it a quality of the light that makes the webs more visible?
What is a spider's mating cycle?
I could look it up. But I'm not Spiderwoman. Someone else do it for me.

Mating cycle?

I tried that once, watch out for the handlebars - and the phrase 'Ring my bell' just doesn't mean the same to me any more.

I don't mind a spider in the house, but more than one can turn into many, and there can definitely be too many spiders in a house.

I don't kill them if they are in the basement. I figure they might capture one of the many camel crickets down there. But if they are in the living area, they are dead to me.

The crickets I will kill any chance I get, but they are fast. And with my killing off the slow ones, the population just keeps getting faster.

We've had far too much wildlife inside our house. Countless mice, a couple birds, a rat, a raccoon, and even a flying squirrel. Not all at once.

:lol:

Oh we need to hear the flying squirrel story....

I woke up at like 3am to my wife's screaming, and then something soft and furry was on my face. In my sleepy state, I remember thinking that it felt kind of nice, but it had claws too and it was trying to find traction on my face, which wasn't nice at all, and my wife was screaming so that was bad too. I turned on the light, and my wife ran out of the bedroom. I closed the door to the bedroom so the squirrel was trapped in there with me. I asked my wife to get me a broom, and the bathroom rug. A moment later she passed them to me through the door. I put the rug at the crack under the door, so the squirrel couldn't get out of the room and into the rest of the house. I opened the 2 windows, and then, in my boxers, I chased that squirrel all around the room with the broom until it went out the window.

It was trying to hide under the bed, which I would then have to yank away from the wall so I could smack around under there with the broom. It would climb the curtains and be up on the curtain rods, and then leap at me. It made it up onto both of our dressers at one point. I realized it was attracted to the lights, so I turned the lights off and grabbed the flashlight on my dresser. It kept coming for my flashlight, so I kind of cupped my hand around the flashlight so it couldn't see the light itself, but I shone the light right in front of the thing. I led it with the light spot to the open window, where it slowly crawled out. I had been chasing it around the room for about 5 minutes, and it was completely exhausted. I was kind of wired after that, and didn't fall back to sleep easily. I think we probably changed the pillow cases it had crawled over and then went back to bed.

It took me a while of looking at pictures on the internet before I figured out what it was. I had seen flying squirrels around here before, but never so close up.

I still have absolutely no idea how it got in.

You should be glad, Boris, that moose was not with squirrel.

glatt that is too funny.

Video or it never happened! :D

Oh Glatt that's a gorgeous story!

Glatt:
Part 1

Part 2

And we just caught our first mouse of the season after I posted that. It bypassed one of the snap traps, and got stuck in the little glue trap I put out for the crickets.

glatt that's like a freaking horror movie! I would freak right the hell out!

Glad it happened to you instead. ;)

We have a mouse in the house that we haven't been able to catch. (We have a catch and release program. Live, I mean.)

Catch and release, just means he'll come back with his posse.

I used to feel bad about hurting the mice, but then they just kept coming. Now it's a routine. Especially when it starts to get cold out. I expect to catch another couple in the next week or two, even though there is no evidence that there are any in the house now. Time to freshen up the bait in all the snap traps.

I always release them near glatt's house.

It's a bit of a drive.

Just remember which side is which. ;)

I use old fashioned traps. For bait, a bit of peanut butter smeared on a bit of cloth. The mouse tugs on the cloth...

heehee

I vote overreacting. highly unlikely it is a brown recluse. I am in a constant battle with my family over house spiders. Most just eat the bugs that get in your house. Scoot them off to the corner most will not hurt you. Well unless you live where Ali lives!

We just caught the first mouse in our house last week. He was a beauty, hated to kill him, but the wife was beginning to object to his eating of food in various plastic bags in the pantry.

Grey on top and tan and white on the bottom. Left the traps out for a few more days but none of his friends or family showed up.

You killed some kids fancy pet shop mouse! :eek: :rolleyes: maybe

When my friend hiked the AT he and a bunch of others got into the practice of hunting the chipmunks that inhabited the lean-tos. They skinned them and kept the pelts. At one time there was talk of making a bikini for one of the lady hikers, but I think she was too curvy for the number of pelts they'd accumulated. Maybe a wicked weasel?

My wife has a number of those. Expensive for the amount of material you get but HOT!;)

One good thing about Minnesota is that the spiders never really get any bigger than an inch (at least from what I've seen). I did see a centipede in the bathroom this morning. Those are nasty.

Centipedes are carniverous too, of course, so it might be a good thing to keep a few of them around the house. I'd hate to be one though, just imagine tying all those shoelaces in the morning!

:vomit:

The plumbing company sent out the 3rd plumber to our place
because the other two were not getting the job done.
It turned out he was also their Supervisor.

He spent most of his time swatting at spider webs, groaning,
and he almost lost it when he actually swatted one of the spiders.
No one has showed up here yet today (noon).
Maybe he just can't face those nasty critters even one more time.

I don't understand it ... a plumber spends a lot of time crawling
in the dark spaces under houses goes "woosey" over a few spiderwebs ???
I suppose that's the reason he was promoted to Supervisor.

My brother had a brown recluse bite on one finger several years ago. After the bottom half of the finger had rotted away the doctor sewed the finger together to the finger next to it, left them together for three weeks, and then cut them apart, then grafted some skin from his thigh to the bottom of the bitten finger to fill in the gaping hole left behind. Quite an ugly and scary wound!

Fuck cancer AND spiders.:skull:

We need tumor-biting brown recluses......