Third rainy day in a row. Yesterday, with intermittent sun and me gone most of the day, the batteries actually got a full charge. I stayed away from high-wattage applications all evening so I was in fairly good shape this morning but today as of noon…
…really gloomy. It’s supposed to be this way till Sunday, when there’s supposed to be at least a little blue sky. We haven’t had heavy rain, but it’s been on and off pretty incessantly. So I wouldn’t expect much pick-up in blog activity for the next couple of days.
Ghost went back to S&L’s today, since they returned last night, but I shouldn’t feel lonely. Look who came to visit!
That, friends and neighbors, is a genuine Brown Recluse spider, Loxosceles reclusa, no friend of mine or anybody else’s, and this one is spending the day under a corner of my cabinet right where I hang my coffee cups. Where I can’t get a good swat at it, and if I try it’ll run off somewhere else like into my bedding or something equally bad. Four and a half years I’ve lived in the Lair, I’ve had spiders a’plenty but nothing like this bad dude. So I never did anything about bug spray.
I was planning to spend the day inside and put Battery Day off til it stopped raining, but now I’m going out to canvass the neighborhood for something poisonous to poisonous spiders. This is why I wear gloves a lot more than I used to.
ETA: A commenter points out some fairly compelling evidence that my spider isn’t a Recluse.
http://bugasalt.com/
Works on flies, but you might need a larger caliber for your fellow hermit there.
Just wait until you find one of them suckers sleeping in a finger of your gloves as you put them on…
}:-]
I guess that one of your firearms would be considered overkill for a spider, even a brown recluse. Although I would find it tempting. My mantra concerning small critters of the insect variety in the house is ” Crickets live. Spiders die. Stink bugs go outside.”
Hair spray. Cheap and I’ll even bet Landlady may have some you could borrow. I have several kinds of wolf spiders in the house, though I seldom see them, and we don’t bother each other. But once I found a big black widow in the closet. No place to swat it either, and I didn’t want it to vanish… I don’t use hair spray anymore since I retired, but I did have the dregs of a can and sprayed the spider good. It curled right up and died.. I had to wash a few things that got sprayed, but that was certainly no problem. Better than filling the air with something not good for you. 🙂
Try your hairspray. Oh wait…
Starting fluid, brake cleaner come to mind. I still have some .22 rat shot rounds somewhere…..
Learn to shoot rubber bands accurately. When I worked in pet stores I was deadly to flies with the rubber bands that come on the big bags of feeder goldfish. You can shoot a rubber band into places a flyswatter can’t go.
I’m out of practice now, but it’s kinda fun.
A rubber-band gun might work.Or a slingshot shooting a bean-bag. Oh, the possibilities!
ML, you’re the second person to recommend hairspray. Apparently it clogs their …whatever they breathe with.
I don’t happen to have any, and neither did the person who first suggested it. He did have some fly spray for horses, so I brought that home and drenched the Recluse with it. It didn’t fall down dead, but by the time it fell behind some books and didn’t come back up it looked distinctly unhealthy. Tonight I’ll don leather gloves and go looking for the body. This ain’t Viet Nam, it ain’t a kill without a body.
Kent, I would no more shoot this thing with a rubber band than I’d poke a wolverine with a stick. I want it dead, not mad at me.
“This ain’t Viet Nam, it ain’t a kill without a body.”
My late husband said something similar many times. He saw both Korea and Viet Nam…
But there is an exception, I think. Right now there is an overwhelmingly dead mouse in my office… SOMEWHERE – and I can’t find it. Got some more stuff to move, but I’ll be perfectly happy if I never find the dried up body… as long as that horrid smell just goes away. sigh
I think that isn’t a brown recluse.
Looks more like a giant crab spider, possibly a juvenile example.
It looks too hairy, has the wrong mandibles and proportions, and has a tapered abdomen. And it lacks the “violin” feature found on the head of a brown recluse.
That’d be an odd place to find a recluse, as well.
Huh. Jed, I believe you’re right. Your photograph is much more definitive than the ones I found.
TN has a shitload of brown recluse spiders. The last shop before the business moved, the bug guys were actually impressed by how many the old building had in it. I don’t give a shit about them, but K is terrified of spiders in general, & really hates recluses.
Well, I’m glad I’m not the first one to say that ain’t no brown recluse. Way too meaty By the way, I never meant suggesting you sounded like James Lileks to be an insult in any way. I’ve followed him pretty much since the internet was invented and it was as good a compliment, accent-wise, as I could summon, being as shocked as I was at your Dee-Troit accent.
But, I’ll have to say, the scorpions I saw crawling out of my boots while with the 1st Tank Battalion at 29 Palms were more impressive that that little thang.
I am waiting for the annual post Monsoon Tarantula bloom here in the SW corner of AZ. Pretty cool critters. Wolf spiders I leave along. Black widows and Brown Recluse die. Yes, I am racist. Black widows almost killed me once and temporarily crippled a hand another time. I show them no mercy. Hair Spray, Non-stick cooking spray, napalm, it all works.
Ah, but the REAL fun, Matt, comes from exsterminating them with one of these:
http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200516521_200516521
Can you say “SPLAT!!!???
I knew you could!
}:-]
A $200 hammer? Dude. How long were you in the military? 🙂
I use about a tablespoon of dish soap per cup of water in a sprayer to kill insects and spiders. Set the spray as coarse as possible and still be accurate. And cleanup is pretty easy. You need to soak the spider, but it’s easy, and the die within a minute.
That’s interesting, and I wonder what sort of soap you use. I use rubbing alcohol diluted with a little water to kill flies and moths, a few other insects, but that doesn’t even bother ants or spiders. Can’t imagine soap being effective, but I may try it. The hair spray is instant death for spiders, but ants are usually so spread out that they require a more systemic remedy. Grant’s Ant Stakes do the job the very few times I have ants in the house. It is impossible to do much with them in the garden unless I put SEVIN powder on their hills. And that’s only temporary… many thousands of acres of grassland around here, and the ant hills are numerous.
I go a different way when it comes to bugs in the house.I generally use a shop vac to do housework,cause I have dog hair and a lot of dust to clean up.I use the long extension,and suck spiders,stinging insects and crawly things up.Once in a while squirting some wasp spray into the vac while it’s turned on usually ensures they’ll die soon after their captivity.
No mess from spraying poison around,and I can suck a flying insect right out of the air.
Well… except for the fact that spraying that stuff into the vacuum puts it out into the air of the room fast, especially if you keep running it. I suspect that going through the vacuum impellers and smashing into the side of the bag or cup will pretty much put the critters out of action. 🙂
ML, I use ordinary dish soap.
I was just looking at the photo of that arachnid and being as I suffer from arachnophobia I all have to say is two words. It doesn’t matter how but… KILL IT! KILL IT! KILL IT! KILL IT! KILL IT! KILL IT!
Gawd I really, really hate spiders.
All this talk of killing spiders amuses me. They don’t bother me a bit. In fact, I used to bring cool looking spiders into the house to let them spin webs. I wouldn’t bring in a brown recluse or a black widow (well, not unless they were in a jar or something).
😀 Well, Kent’s a real buckaroo and MJR’s an arachnophobe. Me, I fall in between. Your average daddy longlegs or wolf spider, I’m all live and let live. Something big brown and hairy, if it’s in my house one of us is leaving.
For the record, this was Dollar Store day and I bought a small can of hairspray. 🙂
“I bought a small can of hairspray.” You will be happy you did. Consult your friendly neighborhood Internet to find a zillion uses.
You will find a can in virtually every bicycle shop, because it’s the best stuff ever for handle grips. On rubber or plastic the stuff seems to act as a wonderful lubricant for about 60 seconds, helping you slip the grip onto the handlebar. Then the grip binds up and stays stuck for life.
Also, you can put a bit onto the end of a frustrating limp and fraying thread, and suddenly that thread will stiffen up so you can successfully thread your needle.
Easy way to tell if it is a brown recluse. Count the eyes!! Brown Recluse had six eyes arranged in three pairs, other spiders (Mostly) have eight eyes in four pairs.
Got to stare them critters down.
So how much do YOU pay for a 20 pound sledge, Joel?
Yeah, you can get one for as little as $47 plus shipping through Amazon:
http://tinyurl.com/hkj8d24
but when the head flies off and takes out your solar panels – or worse yet, your battery bank – you’ll think that $200 was cheap…
}:-]
Now you’ve got me curious, Mark. What in the world would Joel be doing near the batteries or solar panels with a 20 pound hammer anyway? 🙂
Oh, there’ve been days when the thought of adjusting my power system with a 20-pound hammer has seemed to have merit. Took a walk and got over it though…
I can understand that perfectly, Joel. 🙂 But it could be done with almost anything, actually. I can’t even lift a 20 pound hammer… so I have to improvise. LOL
There is actually no great effort resisting the destruction of most things… I can’t afford to replace it! The weed eater gives me great satisfaction instead sometimes. The weeds helpfully replace themselves constantly.
The 20 pound hammer is for the spiders, MamaLiberty. And any other annoyances that might come his way. Such things do not concern themselves with their proximity to things that he values. And as I said, he would NOT want the head flying off a 20 pound sledgehammer onto his solar arrays. Well, not MOST of the time, anyway.
Bet he could get the attention of that bull with such a toy as well…
}:-]
Simple Green works wonders on ants. Had a spray bottle with the straight stuff I had used to clean the stove top, and it brought a budding thief ant invasion to a screeching halt…hosed them down, then sprayed a generous quantity in the hole they had come out of…they just curled up and died, never to return.
Ill also tossup the recommendation for dish soaping sprayer. Have used this for years now. the widow population around my house and even the now defunct cement pond got ridiculous a few years ago and I feared for the hound for all the chemical death I was applying.
Dawn detergent kills bugs dead.
So does a pellet rifle.
Emergency spider killer i use a handheld propane torch turned all the way up works like a champ!
100% positive it is not a brown recluse. It sure is nasty though.
Fastest bug killer I ever used was Methylene Chloride. I used to suck some up in a syringe and spray the offender with it. They died. No dance of death, no twitching. This was used in Colorado on Black Widows. The outfit I used to work for had lots of them in the warehouse.