Spiders

Many of you already know of our struggles with cockroaches. Many floridians can relate to how quickly it goes from seeing one or two cockroaches to where you can't turn around without seeing several. We're finally cockroach free after a course of weekly treatments by Carson Pest Control - all of which were completely harmless to the children, while still being effective on the roaches, themselves.

Now, it looks like we might have to call them back to do a treatment for spiders on our back porch. I had already asked the pest control guy to treat behind our bookshelves for spiders since we had already had experiences with several brown spiders (which we're pretty certain were brown recluses). Then, on our last visit from Carson Pest Control, I had the guy look at a spider I had seen on the back porch, between our sun panels and the porch screen. I had already identified it as a Black Widow, seeing the tell-tale red hourglass on the underside. He sprayed the spider and killed it. However, in the last couple of days, I have become aware of more spiders on the porch - behind our boxes of Christmas decorations over the washer and dryer, in the corners of the ceiling, along the corner by the sliding glass door side that stays closed, etc. I have not been able (or eager, at least) to view them close enough to be sure of identification but a couple of them look like brown recluses. I've sprayed with household pest spray but I'm worried about whether more may be lurking where I can't see. We have a lot of junk items on the porch that we haven't gotten around to bringing to a junk yard (like the soft-side waterbed that no one seems to want) and I'm worried that if we try to bring them through the house now to get them out to the junk yard, we might wake angry poisonous spiders and let them loose int he house. Granted, I might be dramatizing a little bit (I have a tendency for it), but even if the ones I've seen aren't brown recluses, there have been black widows.

See for yourselves... The picture on the top is a picture from the internet (you know, the web - how corny am I?) of a brown recluse spider. The picture on the bottom is a picture of a spider found on our bookcase (I squished him dead after taking the picture).