Got Spiders?

We were sitting on the front porch the other night, when I noticed a spider web on the porch railing that looked like a swarm of gnats caught in the web.

When I looked closer, I found that it was a nest of tiny spiders that must have just hatched out of their egg case.

Just Hatched

I usually just deport spiders if I find them inside the house.  I leave most spiders alone if they are outdoors; they eat other bugs and anything that will take out Black Flies is pretty much fine with me.  Black Flies are small, biting flies that love me for some reason and I do not like the way they fly into my ears.

However, two exceptions to this Spider Tolerance Policy are Black Widow Spiders and Brown Widow Spiders.  The Brown Widows in particular seem to love our front porch, building their messy webs all over the railings around the porch and all over the porch furniture, the porch light and pretty much anything else they can use to anchor their webs.  Their egg sacs are white spheres covered with spiky protrusions; there was an empty sac and another full one just next to where these tiny spiders were, so we knew that's what they were.

We joke that we contract out our Halloween decorations to the spiders because they use locally sourced, organic webbing, but there were just too many of these Brown Widows, so that was the last of them.

We'll leave the decorating to the Orb Weavers, one of whom seems to have designs on entrapping our car.

More on local spiders:  http://waynesword.palomar.edu/redmite.htm