As soon as September arrives and the tourists go home, it is me or do the spiders decide they have he all clear and move indoors in their droves?
I spent most of the weekend moving around the house methodically removing webs and baby spiders as well as the odd large and menacing one. Unfortunately only a few days later they have come back!
A while ago an auntie said that "in her day" she used to collect all the conkers from the trees and put them in breathable bags and dot them around the house. Evidently, as the conkers dry out they give off a chemical that spiders do not like, therefore keeping them at bay! We tried it last year and it certainly worked for us for a few months at least, I am now waiting eagerly for the conkers to start falling.
Does anyone else have any traditional remedies or methods that we could all benefit from?
Erm, what you see scurrying around in your house, find in your sink, tub or toilet in the morning are lovesick, male house-spiders -Tegenaria atrica- ( and identifiable by the 2 relatively large blobs in front of their head) looking for a mate.
Spiders coming to hibernate in your house is a persistent fable. In our regions spiders very rarely live longer than one year so the ones that live outdoors don't need or want to come to your house to hibernate, they just die come winter. The ones that do come to your house do so all year around as for them light equals food. And even then they stay mostly outside, preferably in the neighborhood of your outside lights as the climate inside your house is way to dry for them...
So these (male) house-spiders were, for the largest part of them, already present in your house. (Don't worry, even the house of a real cleaning maniac still has some of these useful creatures left in it ;-)) The difference is that they were sitting quietly in their web somewhere where you didn't spot them. Their mating period starts about now and they scurry around, looking for a sexy, eight-legged ms. spider (who is also already in your house being unobtrusive in a quit corner, your attic or cellar waiting for something edible to fly by).
This mating period last only 2-3 weeks after which the males die, the females pose their little egg-packs and crawl off again to that corner where you didn't spot them before only to die of old age a little while after that.
So if you don't have an arachnophobia, my method would be to do nothing, they are harmless,will disappear quickly and are of course very useful in fighting off other less friendly species.....
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Iām going to try yours. Thanks.