Spiders will undoubtedly take over your indoor or outdoor living spaces, turning your house into a cobwebby maze full of eight-legged freaks. Arachnophobia aside, some species of dark corner loving spiders such as the brown recluse or the black widow spider are poisonous and therefore, must be eliminated using the most effective methods available.
Instead of chasing after them with rolled-up newspapers, which inadvertently leaves a gooey mess, read further and discover how to get rid of spiders for good.
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Information regarding spider contamination, infestation, and termination have been sourced from significant pest control management operators that also happen to have prolific online profiles.
Excerpts of spider prevention recommendations were gathered from Home Depot’s pest control specialists, as well as much of the anti-spider activities that you can handle on your own. Pro Pest Do-It-Yourself Pest Control provided a wealth of advice through their quick reply email and telephone conversations via 800-476-3368.
Professionals at TERMINIX were available for spider related live chats and more commentary reviewed on their resourceful webpages. Spider control specialist Kevin Carrillo answered messages on spider-proofing your house via the message board.
How Spiders Can Attack and Take Over Your House
There are many benefits that can be attributed to spiders on our environment, and arachnids in the garden will help in keeping the pest insect populations low. Insects that spread diseases like fleas, mosquitoes, and cockroaches are eaten by spiders, and some arachnids even hunt lesser spiders.
Though they don’t pose any structural damage to your house, unlike termites, spiders can quickly breed, populate, and make your home appear unkempt, unseemly, and a dangerous living environment.
A variety of spider species will react differently to methods of extermination, and your house has to be spider-proofed, so they don’t keep entering from outside. The number one concern of having spiders in your living spaces, whether indoors or outdoors is that you may get bitten, resulting in severe health issues.
Spiders don’t usually attack people as a means of seeking nourishment, but many will bite as self-defense or protect their young.
Season changes will attract more spiders into your house from the surroundings as spring turns to autumn into winter. Spiders will breed all through their lives, and mating sees them traveling further afield, leaving many of the resulting offspring making your home a permanent abode.
Recommendations from Pest Management Operatives
Proper sanitation makes your home unfavorable for spiders
Controlling a spider infestation begins with adequate home and surroundings sanitation with an aim to reduce conditions that favor them. This can include simple tasks such as thorough vacuuming to remove spiders, cobwebs, and egg sacs or to deal with their food sources, which are other insects.
Clutter from within your closets, corners, basements, or garages and ground covers against the outer foundations of your house must be cleared.
For interior spaces of your house, preventative measures will include sealing any vents, door, or window spaces that provide spider entry. Potential pathways also include gaps where plumbing pipes, wiring, and cables have been passed into the house.
Anything brought into your home from the yard, storage shed, or garden should be checked to stowaway spiders, including firewood or plants.
Reduced insect infestations drive the hungry spider away
As opposed to the way spiders like to occupy spaces with humans, they luckily don’t eat the food you eat, and cutting off their insect supply is an effective way to discourage their habitation. Spiders eat insects such as house flies, ants, cockroaches, or mites, and eliminating these requires the above-mentioned sanitation or house-proofing methods.
Leftover food, dirty dishes, bread crumbs on the floor, and dirty tables or counters attract insects that appear as a buffet to spiders. This is likely to make them stay and populate within your home, and keeping a clean house will discourage clutter that creates hiding spaces within which to build webs as a means to catch insects or hatch their eggs.
Trap your way to a spider-free home
Setting traps all over your living space not only effectively acts on rodents and cockroaches, but also can help catch spiders. Sticky glue traps are natural, non-toxic, and can be laid in attics, basements, closets, or in your spider-infested outdoor spaces. Traps can, however, be a nuisance in houses where there are pets or toddlers, while they require constant monitoring or replacement.
Clearing the spiders breeding grounds
The surrounding of your house should be made as spider as unfriendly as possible, except for your garden where they help to keep plant harmful pests at bay.
Clutter around the house, such as rocks, compost, and woodpiles, must be cleared while cracks, where spiders can reside, should be caulked. The exterior of your house can be power-washed of any cobwebs, while weather strips or sweeps are used on windows to seal spider entry points.
Vegetation nearest to the perimeter of your home can be shifted further away as this attracts insects and serve as spider hiding spots. Trees, shrubs or climbing ivy along the walls of your house, as well as leaves, mulch or green fences, provide ample hunting ground for spiders.
Blindside spiders with less outdoor lighting
Diminishing the number of insects that make up spider cuisine coming to your home will discourage arachnids from overwhelming your living spaces. Most night-time insects love bright lighting, and spiders will set up camp where your lights, lying in wait for these bugs.
Reducing outdoor lighting, or replacing bulbs with yellow, sodium vapor lights are known to minimize spider infestation as insects migrate to other stronger floodlit areas.
While light sources should be fixed away from doors and windows, insects that spiders love to dine on are more attracted to dark siding houses as opposed to homes with lighter sidings. Yellow sodium vapor bulbs don’t attract spiders since they find them too bright and less appealing to insects that spiders hunt.
Let professionals handle the spider-cides aspects
Due to the safety awareness and knowledge of spiders that pest management solution providers have, its best to have them figure out an effective spider mitigation plan. There are chemical formulations that require the application to spider breeding spaces, while others act as barrier treatments or microencapsulated powders.
Exterminating, controlling, and managing spider investment must not be taken as a quick fix, and pest management professionals have the expertise for this ongoing effort.
Type of Spiders Found both Outside and Inside your Home
Various spider types prefer living in environments that are different from others within the species, as some are attracted to dry while others take to damp places. Common house spiders will spend their entire lives hidden in basements, air vents, crawl spaces, attics, and high ceiling corners,as long as food and water are available.
Spiders generally have a preference for spots that are hidden, quiet, and there’s a lot of clutter, such as garages, storage shed, house eaves, shrubby areas, and within light fixtures.
On the northern hemisphere, the most common types of spiders that you’ll come across within your home include;
- Common house spider, Parasteatoda tepidariorum
- The cellar spider, Pholcus phalangioides
- The wolf spider, Lycosidae
- The giant house spider, Eratigena duellica
- The jumping spider, Salticidae
- The southern house spider, Kukulcania hibernalis
- The hobo spider, Eratigena agrestis
- The yellow sac spider, Cheiracanthium mildei
- The Eastern parson spiders, Herpyllus Ecclesiasticus
Though common spiders aren’t inherently harmful to humans as opposed to other common insects like bees, this creepy crawlies create a nuisance and degrade your house with cobwebs. Spider bites are rare but can prove life-threatening when they happen, giving you one more reason why you should keep spiders out of your living space.
Types of spiders whose bite can send you to the ICU include the hobo spider, yellow sac spider, black widow spider, brown recluse spider, and the eastern parson’s spider.
How to Effectively Get Rid Of the Venomous Types of Spiders
The total elimination of spiders from your indoor or outdoor living spaces can be time-consuming, while using strong chemicals may compromise the health of your household.
Research shows that of more than 3000 spider species in the US, 60% are responsible for a nasty bite, but only half of these are found in your neighborhood, let alone within your living areas.
The two documented spiders that haunt the areas you reside in are the brown recluse and the black widow spider.
According to extensive research done by the University Of Kentucky’s College Of Agriculture Food And Environment, all spiders have poison glands that are attached to fangs. Though only a few types of spiders have venom that is extremely poisonous to humans, they use it alongside excellent sight to either stalk, ambush, or trap insects with their webs.
People with an allergic reaction to spider venom, the elderly and young children are especially susceptible to severe side effects when bitten, and it makes sense to keep a spider-free living environment.
Some spiders, such as the venomous mouse spider, will hunt and consume your small pets, while the poison is detrimental to the health of cats or dogs.
As tools of physically cleaning out spiders, their cobwebs, and egg sacs, a JT Eaton Webster Cobweb Duster Head comes highly recommended. Placed on any standard pole with a threaded tip; the cobweb duster can be used to apply insecticide dust to unreachable places where spiders are habituating.
Also available at your local home and living stores is Web Out, a natural product that removes spider cobwebs while leaving a repellant that keeps them away for nearly six months. Outdoor use of Web Out can last three months.
Anti-Arachnid Aerosol Sprays and Insecticide Concentrates
To kill spiders and the insects that spiders feast on; insecticide sprays such as Cyzmic CS are effective when sprayed around your home’s perimeter or entry points. Spider repelling aerosols are particularly effective in upward-facing spaces where water-based products may not reach. Suggested encapsulated insecticides in aerosol and concentrate forms include;
Cyzmic CS
This is a residual treatment that should be targeted at places where cobwebs have been identified, such as under eaves, on decks, porches, or vents leading into your house from the outside. Indoor spray treatment against the food supply for spiders will include spraying baseboards, cracks, underneath furniture, in corners, or within cracks.
LambdaStar Ultracap 9.7
This is a microencapsulated concentrate spray for the outdoors as well as the indoors, which is ideal for hard to reach areas and structural perimeter treatments. Containing a lambda-cyhalothrin formulation; this concentrate is easy to measure, mix, and apply for which it adhered readily to surfaces. LambdaStar Ultracap 9.7 has long residual effects with high mortality for excellent anti-spider protection that last up to 12 weeks after application.
DPD Cyper WSP
This is a wettable powder that is effective against spiders, whether in or outside of your house. The water-soluble packets make mixing DPD Cyper WP in one pound pails of water for a prolonged-lasting quick knockdown of spiders alongside 29 other insects.
Onslaught FastCap
A microencapsulated insecticide; this spider killer can be used for the inside or outside that is particularly potent to arachnids and across a broad insect spectrum. Onslaught FastCap Spider and Scorpion Insecticide is a pyrethroid that contains a unique exponent synergist to enhance the disruption of insect nervous systems by active ingredients Prallethrin and Esfenvalerate.
With an effect that can last for 12 months, Onslaught FastCap only requires dampening the surface and is sufficient for injecting into wall voids, or for crevice and crack treatment.
D-Force HPX Aerosol
This is useful for treating your cracks and crevices against spider habitation, and the aerosol spray comes with an application tip and lasts from 4 to 8 weeks. A residual action insecticide, D-Force provides a Deltamethrin based control over spiders, termites and other bugs with a super-fast knock-out. Use this highly active spider-killer in outdoor or indoor spaces in a localized manner, and you can apply during crevice, crack, or spot treatment.
What Can Effectively Combat Large Spider Infestations?
Significant spider problems call for additional measures that include dust treatment to hideaway corners or house attics. For the continual management and deterrent of spiders, place Trapper LTD Insect Glue Boards or a Biocare Spider Trap, which also serve as spider infestation monitoring tools. Expert recommendations include:
DPD D-Fense Dust comes recommended alongside the Cobweb Duster Head, which assists in its placement where spiders make their cobwebs. Application is made to corners of attics, garages, porches, basements, and external areas where spiders have infested. With an active 0.05% of Deltamethrin, DPD D-Fense has a waterproof dust formulation that avoids clumping for an effective eight-month undisturbed knockdown.
Dustin Mizer Duster is an applicator that works well with large outdoor spaces, with dust propelling abilities of 20 to 30 feet. This anti-spider dusting tool can also be used to dust insecticide onto plants that have been infested by spiders, and are effective for pointed-up dusting in tight spaces. Get years of lightweight, durable polystyrene plastic service that is non-corrosive and has a hopper capacity of 1 pound.
Trapper LTD Insect Glue Boards will catch spiders without the use of chemicals and can be placed alongside walls, corners, and inside crawl spaces. Fold up the Trapper LTD Glue Board into a covered trap within spaces where there’s a lot of dust, and works well in sensitive food areas or where household members have allergic reactions to pyrethroids.
Biocare Spider and Silverfish Trap is a device that imitates the hiding spaces that spiders like and will catch any Arachne that comes along baseboards or running edges. A natural and disposable trap, the Biocare Spider Trap, is easy to handle and also targets silverfish that hide in papers, books, or boxes.