It’s that time of year again, when black widow spiders leave the mountain wilderness and head inside for the winter. Two years ago (fall 2013) seemed to be a big black widow fiesta at my house. I found so many back widows, in dangerous places (inside boots and skates), that I started to think they might take over. In contrast, the following year (2014) seemed like a mild year for spiders—I found a few but they were all in our garage and average/small in size.
2015 is proving to be the year of the spider! It began with me finding a harmless relative of the black widow in my home office. Then, this past weekend my daughter Tabitha nearly walked face first into the mother of all black widows who was hanging from her mid-air web in our furnace room. Peter relocated the 10 cm beast (from leg tip to leg tip) to a rock wall just down the street. She’ll have the best chance to survive the winter there—by burrowing beneath the rocks.
I immediately banned my girls from entering the room until Peter and I have time to do a thorough spider evacuation. Later on in the evening, I sent Peter into the furnace room to make room for extra toys I was going to give away—I spent the entire weekend cleaning out/down sizing the playroom to make sure that it was spider free.
Peter shouted immediately on entering the furnace room, “Get the spider jar!”—our handy spider relocating kit. He’d discovered the sister of the black widow (from earlier in the day). The sister was huge too. We relocated her to the same rock wall and then I got to worrying…
The sisters were huge. If the size of the spider is any indication of how much venom they store, it was clear that they might contain enough to kill a fair-sized human (hence me sending in the biggest human in our family to relocate the sisters: Peter). I hadn’t seen a black widow that big since I found the granny of all spiders on our garage ceiling about 7 years ago (her abdomen was nearly loonie size).
I received tips from friends that acorns and chestnuts keep spiders away. Vicki, a neighbourhood friend, kindly offered me a bag of chestnuts as well as a bottle of peppermint essential oils (spiders apparently don’t like peppermint). I placed the chestnuts and sprayed peppermint liberally around the main floor.
The only glitch in the spider evacuation plan was that my dog Pablo snuck downstairs and ate a few of the chestnuts. I found him crunching one in his kennel at bed time and searched the corners of the rooms to discover a few missing… Yes, Pablo-Diablo was on fire yesterday: he illegally ate several chestnuts from the floor, plus 2 chocolate chips breakfast muffins and a turkey sandwich from the kitchen counter (earlier that morning). He had many time outs in his kennel for those infractions.
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