Spider Season?

Postalgeek – you make me laugh.

I completely sympathise with the OP. And all the talk of ‘but they won’t hurt you’ and ‘they’re not poisonous’ is a waste of time – if its phobic proportion fear, it doesn’t respond to rational thought.

I’m with the other respondents who have suggested a spraying. Do it. Only needs to be inside (unless of course you end up finding huntsmen in your car! AGH!). Humans live inside, spiders live outside.

I don’t want them dead, but I don’t want them inside near me more than I value their life. So I call the pest controller.

I call for a Spider Week of RiotACT photography to follow up Butterfly Week!

White tails like to eat other spiders too, the paranoia about their bite being deathly awful has been debunked pretty thoroughly. Might swell a bit though.

Mosquitos are members of the respectable bourgeoisie of the creepy crawly world compared to spiders with their profligate and indiscriminate reproductive habits. No respectable madam mosquito would deposit 1000 wrigglers in somebody’s bedroom.

Suburban wrigglers grow up (or not) in tasteful water features or rustic pot plant bases. In the less desirable areas, they may inhabit old ice cream containers and abandoned oil/kero drums. But, they are not exposed to gratuitous nudity and sex in people’s bedrooms.

The League of Mosquitos thanks you for your vigilance.

fuck the bomb, get someone in to spray. We do that once a year and it’s fantastic. Only costs $120 or so and it keeps the freaky things away for 12 months.

Lets hope you’ve killed them all. Those little spiders grow very big, sometimes as big as a CD, then they hide and wait until you’re asleep and then crawl into your bed.

We had this too. We just put the entire curtain outside, and retrieved it a few days later – problem solved. The surface spray probably just made tham all jump off into your room.

I thank the day they invented surface spray. You can get them from a distance, rather than risking a broom (with a crawl-able handle). One day I noticed literally thousands of tiny translucent huntsmen, all over the walls and ceiling. I spent significant time killing them, knowing the ones I missed would appear above my head in coming nights. and they did.

You should set a bug bomb in your room before you leave, just set and forget.

I reckon killing all spiders (bombs, sprays etc) actually encourages red backs as they come back quicker without competition from other spiders.
Spiders like to eat one another and I encourage daddy long legs to keep the others (redbacks, white tails etc) under control.
Your normal household fly spray does a bad job of killing really big redbacks (just seems to make them angry). Much better option is WD 40 or similar.

Poor you. Sounds like there must have been an egg sac somewhere in the room, and they hatched while you were away. The hot spell a few days ago really brought on the hatchings – and the tiny ones can get through flyscreen wire and teeny cracks around doors and windows, no probs.

It is worth getting a decent surface spray and spraying around your windows and doors (on the outside), which will lessen the numbers a lot. But in summer, I usually send at least one spider a day to Spider Heaven from inside the house. No guilt either – they have the whole outside to live in, but if they cross the threshhold, trespassing attracts the death penalty around here!

Bug bombs are going to do far more long term damage to your health than an infestation of tiny spiders.

/end hippy rant

Those little buggers are everywhere at the moment, although surface spray is a bit of overkill, especially inside. Just your run of the mill fly spray will deal will them.

White Tails will cause a nasty bite, but that’s about it, so not too much to be worried about there, either.

Perhaps when housesitting, it might be worth continuing basic maintenance on your own residence – It will prevent this kind of thing happening in the future.

Agree. Bomb the room, and the entire house. Trim back any trees/branches near the windows and spray surface spray on (outside) window gaps.

Hope you get some sleep while on holiday! Sounds like you might need to wage war when you get back!

I would suggest buying a bug bomb and bug bombing the place. That or take off an nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.