House o' Spiders

[Tiny]

This is just creepy... and leaves me lots of unanswered questions:

ADDED:   CREEPY CRAWLY WARNING - link contains pictures of spiders.   Viewer discretion advised.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/10/brown-recluse-spider-infestation-missouri_n_5965116.html

If this house got overrun with spiders (brown recluse) and if (as one of the exterminator guys states) older houses tend to have a brown recluse or two... how come other houses aren't overrun with spiders?  

What exactly were the brown recluses EATING.... besides each other?  And how often do the spiders need to keep reproducing to keep a population of 6000 alive (and reproducing) - ie when do they reach critical mass and their ability to feed on each other halts the population growth?

How exactly does a spider population get that big?   

I have no illusions that houses - even new ones - have all sorts of fauna (and flora) living in them besides humans (and their pets).      It's just,  how come most houses manage to keep the spiders, beetles, house centipedes  and whatever other carnivorous bugs live in houses  at a manageable level without alot of pesticides?  

I haven't had to deal with roaches - either I'm niave and I have them OR the spiders/house centipedes and whatever other carnivorous bugs in my house find them extra tasty and so there aren't enough to ever see or find.  I routinely see Yellow (sac?) house spiders and house centipedes at home (the cats find them amusing and tasty).  I also have the occassional house beetle and cricket  (also delicacies for cats).  Who knows what else. 

I dont' recommend googling for pictures of spiders or spider info if you are squeamish about them.  Just saying...   

[Bonny]

You posted this knowing that the last item on my tenant's list was "Spider Infestation" right?

[Tiny]

Oct 10, 2014 15:35:35 GMT -5 Bonny said:

You posted this knowing that the last item on my tenant's list was "Spider Infestation" right?

Gak!  I didn't know....  ::insert Embarrassed Emoticon here ::

[Bonny]

Oct 10, 2014 15:49:29 GMT -5 Tiny said:

Oct 10, 2014 15:35:35 GMT -5 Bonny said:

You posted this knowing that the last item on my tenant's list was "Spider Infestation" right?

Gak!  I didn't know....  ::insert Embarrassed Emoticon here ::

At least they haven't claimed it was an infestation of brown recluse spiders...yet!

I'm thinking they may have actually brought them in themselves either from their mini-storage unit or from their frequent camping trips. Neither the former tenant nor I had any issues with spiders.

[chen35]

I can never un-see this in my mind.

[Bonny]

Oct 10, 2014 14:25:32 GMT -5 Tiny said:

This is just creepy... and leaves me lots of unanswered questions:

www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/10/brown-recluse-spider-infestation-missouri_n_5965116.html

If this house got overrun with spiders (brown recluse) and if (as one of the exterminator guys states) older houses tend to have a brown recluse or two... how come other houses aren't overrun with spiders?  

What exactly were the brown recluses EATING.... besides each other?  And how often do the spiders need to keep reproducing to keep a population of 6000 alive (and reproducing) - ie when do they reach critical mass and their ability to feed on each other halts the population growth?

How exactly does a spider population get that big?   

I have no illusions that houses - even new ones - have all sorts of fauna (and flora) living in them besides humans (and their pets).      It's just,  how come most houses manage to keep the spiders, beetles, house centipedes  and whatever other carnivorous bugs live in houses  at a manageable level without alot of pesticides?  

I haven't had to deal with roaches - either I'm niave and I have them OR the spiders/house centipedes and whatever other carnivorous bugs in my house find them extra tasty and so there aren't enough to ever see or find.  I routinely see Yellow (sac?) house spiders and house centipedes at home (the cats find them amusing and tasty).  I also have the occassional house beetle and cricket  (also delicacies for cats).  Who knows what else. 

I dont' recommend googling for pictures of spiders or spider info if you are squeamish about them.  Just saying...   

I know certain populations (we'll call them "bugs") can get out of whack for different reasons. In AZ it was common for houses in established neighborhoods to get scorpion invasions when next door to a new build.

[Tiny]

I guess it depends on the person for what they mean by 'infestation'. Every spring and fall there's more 'bug' activity - so ants, spiders, lady bugs, crickets, etc.

I've seen quite a few yellow house spiders (or maybe the same one that just moves around alot) in the last week or so - but that's pretty normal as the seasons change. I can see where someone might jump to the "it's an infestation!" cause it's so out of the ordinary. The spiders will vanish in another week or two. They'll reappear in the spring. I like to think it's a kind of spider 'snow bird' thing... just moving from their summer home(s) to their winter home(s) (or visa versa) and they've got to travel thru my space to get there.

[Angel!]

I kill a few spiders a week.  I am under no illusion that there aren't dozens more hiding.  I could see someone who maybe has never dealt with spiders & basements & such calling that an infestation.  For your sake I kind of hope your tenant was exagerrating the problem when stating you have an infestation Bonny.

I found a really large black widow in the garage just a few days ago.  Blech!  It was in a single position so long I managed to get the bug spray out, get my camera out to snap some pics, & bring the kids out so they could learn to identify a black widow, and then kill it.  It was so eerily large & unmoving that I actually wondered if it was a really good fake (but who the heck put it there?).  But it ran like hell when I sprayed it

[Bonny]

Oct 10, 2014 16:11:41 GMT -5 Angel! said:

I kill a few spiders a week.  I am under no illusion that there aren't dozens more hiding.  I could see someone who maybe has never dealt with spiders & basements & such calling that an infestation.  For your sake I kind of hope your tenant was exagerrating the problem when stating you have an infestation Bonny.

I found a really large black widow in the garage just a few days ago.  Blech!  It was in a single position so long I managed to get the bug spray out, get my camera out to snap some pics, & bring the kids out so they could learn to identify a black widow, and then kill it.  It was so eerily large & unmoving that I actually wondered if it was a really good fake (but who the heck put it there?).  But it ran like hell when I sprayed it

Given everything else they exaggerated, probably.  I suspect the condo complex that they moved from had pest control so they are probably not used to seeing "bugs".

I personally like spiders; they keep the rest of the insect population in control. If they are somewhere in my house then I usually grab a tissue (would do something else for a black widow or brown recluse) and set them outside.

We got an explosion of fruit flies over the last couple of weeks. I think they came in on a bad box of fruit we got from Costco. I have a spider in a corner in my living room near my orchids which is doing a fine job. Between him and the red wine vinegar we've reduced that "explosion" to only a few. The cooler weather should finish them off!

[msventoux]

I refuse to click on the link!    I have enough trouble going into the crawlspace of my house when necessary.  If there's pictures at the link I'll never be able to go down there again.  Or sleep.

[mmhmm]

Oct 10, 2014 16:20:32 GMT -5 Bonny said:

Oct 10, 2014 16:11:41 GMT -5 Angel! said:

I kill a few spiders a week.  I am under no illusion that there aren't dozens more hiding.  I could see someone who maybe has never dealt with spiders & basements & such calling that an infestation.  For your sake I kind of hope your tenant was exagerrating the problem when stating you have an infestation Bonny.

I found a really large black widow in the garage just a few days ago.  Blech!  It was in a single position so long I managed to get the bug spray out, get my camera out to snap some pics, & bring the kids out so they could learn to identify a black widow, and then kill it.  It was so eerily large & unmoving that I actually wondered if it was a really good fake (but who the heck put it there?).  But it ran like hell when I sprayed it

Given everything else they exaggerated, probably.  I suspect the condo complex that they moved from had pest control so they are probably not used to seeing "bugs".

I personally like spiders; they keep the rest of the insect population in control. If they are somewhere in my house then I usually grab a tissue (would do something else for a black widow or brown recluse) and set them outside.

We got an explosion of fruit flies over the last couple of weeks. I think they came in on a bad box of fruit we got from Costco. I have a spider in a corner in my living room near my orchids which is doing a fine job. Between him and the red wine vinegar we've reduced that "explosion" to only a few. The cooler weather should finish them off!

I've been battling fruit flies, as well. So have my daughter and SIL. Miserable little beggars! We think ours came in on bananas. Fortunately, no spiders or other things with too darned many legs!

[MarleyKeezy78]

Not to freak you out but of you see any yellow sac spiders, just kill them. They have the potential for the same reaction as the brown recluse. The venom is not as powerful but can still necrotize skin in some cases. I have been using orange, peppermint and tea tree oil in my cleaning and they have been greatly reduced this year.

[Nazgul Girl]

   I dislike spiders with great intensity.    I don't dare watch this video !  

[Bonny]

Oct 11, 2014 9:21:02 GMT -5 Nazgul Girl said:

   I dislike spiders with great intensity.    I don't dare watch this video !  

I didn't think it was that big of a deal. And I don't understand why the folks didn't tent the house years ago.

[Opti]

Oct 11, 2014 0:29:30 GMT -5 MarleyKeezy78 said:

Not to freak you out but of you see any yellow sac spiders, just kill them. They have the potential for the same reaction as the brown recluse. The venom is not as powerful but can still necrotize skin in some cases. I have been using orange, peppermint and tea tree oil in my cleaning and they have been greatly reduced this year.

Marley, can you explain more about how you are using these oils

to clean and where, that it impacts the spider population?

I have a small amount of tea tree oil that I sometimes use as its

safe for my critters in small enough concentrations. I prefer it over

bleach, but use vinegar more often. 

[Opti]

Oct 11, 2014 9:37:29 GMT -5 Bonny said:

Oct 11, 2014 9:21:02 GMT -5 Nazgul Girl said:

   I dislike spiders with great intensity.    I don't dare watch this video !  

I didn't think it was that big of a deal. And I don't understand why the folks didn't tent the house years ago.

Spider daycare?

[seriousthistime]

My DS and DIL lived in St. Louis for a while.  They had some brown recluse spiders in their apartment; not an infestation, but it was kind of freaky.  One time they found a live one under my son's bed pillow.

I have always hated spiders.  It's unfortunate that clicking on the story in the St. Louis Dispatch has caused spider pics to pop up whenever I go to an online news source.  I have to look out for pics of spidery legs as I scroll down the page, and if I start to see legs I focus on the left side and scroll down past that photo.  I'm getting parts of lots of news stories read.  

In Colorado we had wolf spiders.  OMG!  With legs included they were the size of the palm of my hand. The first one I saw, it was around Halloween and some people with kids had been visiting and I thought it was plastic.  I stared at it for a couple of minutes thinking, "real...", "plastic...", "real...", "plastic..."  Finally I decided to get the Raid and spray it just in case.  When that thing got sprayed, it moved so fast I'm getting chills up and down my spine just thinking about it.  When it started to slow down I whacked it with a broom for about half an hour until I was absolutely sure it was dead.  My sister also gets wolf spiders in New England.  Last time I was visited, I'd been there a few days when she said, "Um, you might want to shake out your bath towel before you use it..." Then she told me that there was "just a small one" on her bath towel.  Right.  She lives with such an array of bugs inside and outside her house that it makes me reluctant to visit.  When I lived in New England there were some really big black spiders in my newly built house; had them for four years after we moved in. Once when I went to kill one it actually reared up on some of its legs like it was going to attack.  

I'm such a wimp when it comes to scary bugs and snakes and so forth that whenever I investigate a new location to move to, I want to find out what pests are prevalent around there but can't do a Google search because random pictures of fearsome critters pop up.  And have you ever been to the office of a pest control place?  The one I went had samples of some of the things they've killed and have taken pests from (like a rotting piece of wood with termites still intact, a gigantic bees' nest.  Speaking of bees, did you see the news story about a bee attack in southern Arizona?  800,000 bees...

www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2014/10/09/douglas-arizona-bee-attack-expert-abrk/16970145/

[seriousthistime]

Oct 11, 2014 9:37:29 GMT -5 Bonny said:

Oct 11, 2014 9:21:02 GMT -5 Nazgul Girl said:

   I dislike spiders with great intensity.    I don't dare watch this video !  

I didn't think it was that big of a deal. And I don't understand why the folks didn't tent the house years ago.

My DIL had a friend who bought a house with pretty regular sightings of brown recluses. She told me they are notoriously difficult to get rid of because the airborne pesticides don't affect them.  Something about how most spiders clean themselves and ingest the pesticides, but brown recluses don't do that.  They apparently don't carry the pesticides back to a nest either. 

So would YOU buy a house that had been tented to get rid of thousands of brown recluses?  I wouldn't. 

[Spellbound454]

So would YOU buy a house that had been tented to get rid of thousands of brown recluses? I wouldn't.

No...... and I don't think the poisonous gas residue would do you much good either.

I think the spiders are coming in here (UK) because they are breeding....... They aren't poisonous but I couldn't live in a house with a lot of spiders....EWW Too many legs

[Bonny]

Oct 11, 2014 13:34:41 GMT -5 seriousthistime said:

Oct 11, 2014 9:37:29 GMT -5 Bonny said:

I didn't think it was that big of a deal. And I don't understand why the folks didn't tent the house years ago.

My DIL had a friend who bought a house with pretty regular sightings of brown recluses. She told me they are notoriously difficult to get rid of because the airborne pesticides don't affect them.  Something about how most spiders clean themselves and ingest the pesticides, but brown recluses don't do that.  They apparently don't carry the pesticides back to a nest either. 

So would YOU buy a house that had been tented to get rid of thousands of brown recluses?  I wouldn't. 

My point in the above comment was questioning why they didn't tent when the problem wasn't initially treatable? And let me back up a bit. Almost all lenders require a pest inspection before they lend. While they are primarily looking for termites and dry rot, a "spider infestation" of Brown Recluses would have been noted and treatment recommended. If that treatment didn't work the first go around the pest company would have been on the hook for another round or until the infestation was removed. FWIW we had this happen with termites in our N. San Diego County house. There was a second "tenting".  And another round of pest control to deal with the ants that come in to harvest the termite bodies.

Anyway, like any sensational news story there's probably more to the story than what we are reading.

As to your question if I would buy such a house with a known defect/history; it all depends on the price and whether I felt I could mitigate the risk. Almost all houses have problems of some sort. The house that we currently live in has had a settlement problem. There is a four inch difference between the far corner of the kitchen and the far corner of the guest room (think of a diagonal line across the house). That's a lot. The prior owner disclosed the problem, had a geotechnical report and stated the problem had been corrected. I reviewed the report, read the recommendation fix and reviewed the "Repair" plan. They were different than the recommendation in the report! We then got our own geotechnical expert, had him review the "Repair" and the Geotech made some further recommendations regarding drainage. We were able to knock a little more off the house for those repairs and closed the deal.

We completed the suggest repairs and in 19 years we have had no further issues.

It's like so many things in life, we've all got different risk tolerances and "stuff" we can deal with.

[Deleted]

Oct 11, 2014 9:37:29 GMT -5 Bonny said:

Oct 11, 2014 9:21:02 GMT -5 Nazgul Girl said:

   I dislike spiders with great intensity.    I don't dare watch this video !  

I didn't think it was that big of a deal. And I don't understand why the folks didn't tent the house years ago.

Yeah, I don't get leaving it go for years while they spent 10X as much on legal fees.  Maybe it would have completely taken care of the issue. 

[seriousthistime]

I didn't read this particular story; I read the article in the St. Louis Dispatch.

The house inspection wouldn't have necessarily turned up the infestation.  I think it was the day of closing or the day after, the buyer noticed a spider web on a chandelier.  They cleaned it off, and then started noticing more and more spider webs in different places.  Then the wife noticed a spider behind some loose wallpaper. The sellers plainly did what they could to clean up the house enough to sell it and get the problem past the inspector and walk-through.

Here in the Midwest, we have termite inspections when a house sells and have to disclose whether the house has ever been treated for wood-boring insects such as termites, carpenter ants, and carpenter bees.  I've never seen anything about spider infestations. 

I suppose the reason why the homeowners tried to get insurance to cover extermination and went after the previous owners is that it was the least expensive route.  I have no idea how much it costs to "tent" a house for a brown recluse extermination, but hiring a lawyer to take the case on a contingency would probably be low cost, up front. And I have no idea how successful a tented extermination would be.  

But maybe all these questions are addressed in this article.  I don't care to see more pictures of poisonous creepy-crawlers just to read more articles ... the one article in the St. Louis Dispatch was enough.

Some known house defects are fine, as long as the price reflects what it would take to fix the problem.  But this particular problem?  There would be no price that low enough for me to take it on.  That was my question: would you take on this particular problem?  

[Angel!]

Oct 12, 2014 10:42:23 GMT -5 seriousthistime said:

 That was my question: would you take on this particular problem?  

Hell No!  Maybe if it was free & I had the funds to do a complete tear down & rebuild.