Winter brought Us a Visitor

Princess Five yelled up to me from the basement tonight that we had company. 

I thought I miss heard her so I asked her to repeat herself. She came upstairs and once again stated, "We have company." I looked at her funny and she then said we have a "Visitor" in the basement. I knew we didn't have any visitors over so I figured it was a bug of some kind and she informed me that we had a black widow in the hall near the stairs. 

She said "It is a good thing that it wasn't here while the baby was here." I had to agree with her on that.  Over the past 20 years, I have had four or five inside that I can count. Over the past few years, I have sprayed the window wells and we have had less and less than we used to have but this year, I didn't spray and did notice we had some webs in the garage and one in the bathroom downstairs so for us to have two in the house this year, makes me worry a bit. 
 
I am going to spray early next spring. We had a winter storm with snow, sleet and ice this weekend and I think it drove the spiders in. This is not near any window so this little gal had to travel a long way to end up where she did. 

She is sluggish but instead of killing her as Princess Five didn't want to get "guts" on the carpet, I thought I would catch her and let Princess Five get a close up look at the web formation and how the spider looks as I usually don't show them to the kids and just kill them. 

To catch the spider, a glass jar is best as you can keep your hands far from the spider. Warning - Do this with adult supervision and at your own risk.... 

Stick the glass jar over the spider and slide a flat card of some thickness under the jar and flip, then put a lid on it when the spider is at the bottom of the jar. 

If you want to save the jar, be careful if you open it and there is a web attached to the top of it or near the top of the jar as they can move FAST when they want. 

Growing up, we had black widows in our yard and I saw them often. We usually killed them but one day I showed my mom a live one and she caught it and we watched it lay an egg sack in a jar and then later, LOTS of babies emerged. It was interesting to watch it go through the process of life. My mother delivered the entire jar to the local university as she knew they liked them for research.

I wasn't sure Princess Five would show much interest but I found her watching it about four different times today. It was cute watching her observe it.

She said she saw it "shoot" a web towards the lid of the jar. If she saw that, that is cool as I didn't know they could do that, my understanding was that the went ahead of the web but I can say that I haven't watched them for lengths of time so I really don't know and watching a PBS special about it would creep me out so I will just have to take her word for it. 
 
It did play dead when I tried to get it into the bottle. Just typing this blog and posting about this, I am now getting paranoid that I need to check the inside of my shoes before putting them on. I met a lady that put her foot into her shoe and was bit by one.

I also have a friend bit while sleeping so now I am getting really paranoid to go to bed and worry that I need to vacuum out all the bedrooms, windows, under the beds and closets. Or, I can just watch something until I fall asleep and perhaps tomorrow, it won't be so creepy. I just hope we don't have any more visitors.