I found ~30 baby spiders scattered across my bathroom ceiling/venturing into the adjacent room after coming home from a weekend trip. I vacuumed those up and sprayed the 2 rooms with pesticide. I’m worried about what to do next because I haven’t found the nest anywhere and online pictures seem to imply there should be many more spiders.
My best guess is that they came from a vent on the ceiling, because they’ve all been on the ceiling so far and its been many months since I’ve used the HVAC. I think I might just wipe all of the vent covers down with the pesticide… How worried should I be? Is there anything else I could do to keep them from spreading into my home? My partner is against harsh chemicals so I’m trying to avoid dousing the entire home.
there should be spiders in your walls. they eat the worse shit. as long as they’re not recluses or widows (or whatever the actual dangerous kind in your locality are) leave them alone. They’re like the insect version of cats, they’re a symbiotic organism that keeps disease out. I understand not wanting them directly in your space with you but if they’re in the walls and vents where they belong leave them alone. trust me if you’d ever woken up to a cockroach crawling on your face or had your house eaten out from under you but termites you’d welcome the hidden spiders because modern cockroaches and termites don’t give a flying fuck about pesticides.
I have some friends who used to have a really shitty apartment, first floor and basement of a shitty rowhome that by all rights should probably have been condemned.
The basement was two rooms, a larger room with nothing much but an old claw foot bathtub (that appeared to be hooked up to a drain but had no faucet or any obvious pipes nearby where it could have ever had water running to it)
And the spider room. I shit you not this room was almost nothing but floor to ceiling spider webs. Being a bunch of broke college kids with little enough use for the basement in general, they decided that they weren’t going to do anything about it. They just placed a sheet of plywood in front of the doorway and let the spiders do their thing.
And the spiders, accepted and respected this arrangement. They lived there for several years and not once did they ever see a single spider in any other part of the apartment.
The centipedes were another story, they frequently ventured into other parts of the house. One of those friends still likes to go on about how you can reason with spiders but not with centipedes.
But, I can only assume due to the high spider and millipede population in this apartment, there was basically no other bugs to be found there. The house was in the sort of perpetual state of squalor that you’d expect from 3 guys living on their own for the first time. The pipes leaked, everything was drafty, there was often a thin coating of grime on nearly everything, they had mice and maybe the occasional rat, but there was not a single roach, beetle, or fly to be found.
You’re done.
Nothing you can spray into a vent is anything you want to spray in a vent.
Not that it’s necessary or useful. Most spiders disperse fairly quickly anyway. There are species that share space, but there wouldn’t be thirty of them moving across your ceiling, they’d be holed up wherever they live and you wouldn’t see them.
For real, even the pesticide was a waste of time and money.
Don’t be wiping down your vents with stuff like that. That’s a horrible idea.
I need some of this. My house has cockroaches everywhere… been like this for years… 😭
Why is my family so ghetto lol
Literally everything we do is so “poor people things” (and we’re not even that poor, just horder-y and frugal-y)
Dude I hope you get to move out within the next year or so
Shit my whole city is gross with cockroaches. You go outside anywhere after dark and the sidewalk wriggles. 🤢
Unironically, not trying to be silly, but I think you need to accept that you’re gonna have a “few” “extra” spiders for a little while. Because yeah, there’s hella more spiders than that and they’ve probably spread by now. And as other commenters have said, as long as the spiders aren’t venemous, you probably do want some spiders in the house (as long as they’re not spinning webs where you walk) to get rid of the actually dangerous bugs.
Most of the spiders will have eaten each other.
If you see them spreading into your living spaces, you can spray them with isopropyl alcohol for a quick clean up. If they’re staying out of your living areas, they’re the last defense you’ve got against real pests. Spiders, being apex predators, tend to be well spaced out except at hatching time. I usually transport my house spiders outside somewhere sheltered when they start looking fat, so they won’t lay their eggs inside. A few make it back in to patrol the inside of my walls, and eventually the cycle repeats.
Who collected them?
