3077 Wrangling Spiders

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Definition of politeness: Acceptable hypocrisy.

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On my post about staying bedbug-free by keeping spiders, The Queen left the following comment: "Gary is of the same mind. You could make quite a business of rustling spiders, bringing them into infested houses, and then collecting them again after they had cleaned out the infestation. Just need to microchip them."

When I stopped laughing at the thought of microchipping and wrangling spiders, I thought about it a little more.

It CAN be done! We'd need a way to collect them when the job's done without injuring them, and I have a solution.

Scientists are always gluing colored dots and tiny chips to bugs. What we'd need to do is glue tiny bits of iron to the spider's backs. Then when the job is done, we'd just need to wave an electromagnet (that we can turn on and off to capture and release) around the rooms to collect our spiders. We should use a variety of spider that carries its eggs and/or babies around with them so we could continually increase the herd. Of course, some will hatch and disperse at the customer's house, but that could be considered a bonus to the customer.

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I have spiders living behind and under the head of my bed. Two varieties - wolf spiders and cellar spiders. The wolf spiders are hairy, stocky, and dark. The cellar spiders are tiny, almost transparent, long-legged. They are so transparent we used to call them ghost spiders. They're the guys that build the webs in ceiling corners.

Sometimes while I'm lying on my belly doing crosswords or reading in bed, a spider will run across the end of my bed under my nose. It never pleases me, but they're too fast to smack. (Besides, they protect me from bedbugs.)

Last night a relatively large cellar spider ran halfway across the pillow, stopped, and seemed confused. I used my pencil to knock it to the side, the direction it had been headed, where it fell into another cellar spider's web, built between the side of my bed and the bookcase.

Commotion!

I think the reason it had stopped and seemed confused was because of the other spider's web, which would have been very new. How it knew it was there I don't know. I guess it saw it, although it was invisible to me. Anyway, "my" spider was female, and the web belonged to a male, judging by their relative sizes. When my spider hit the web, all Hell broke loose.

The male ran immediately to the disturbance in its web, and the female tore herself loose and tried to run away. The male caught her by the leg, and they rolled around a bit, then she got free and tore off the web and up the wall, and he tore back to safety behind the bookcase. As fast as they run across my pillow, I'd never seen them move this fast.

I don't think it was a case of a rejected suitor. When food is scarce, cellar spiders turn cannibal.
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