WQOW.com News 18 Eau Claire, WI
Posted: Sep 29, 2011 7:29 PM EDT
Eau Claire County (WQOW) - If you've noticed more spiders around your house this year you're probably not alone.
People are seeing more spiders. Spiders are also bigger. Tom Majors, an entomologist with Wil-Kil Pest Control, says a warm, wet summer lead to more insects which gave spiders a more available food source.
The UW-Extension says they've also noticed the trend.
"I probably get a handful a year on large spiders, we get the house spider questions too, but the good thing with house spiders is they don't reproduce very fast, so the numbers don't boom suddenly," says Erin LaFaive, Eau Claire County UW-Extension Horticulture Educator.
LaFaive says most callers are curious about safety.
"They want to know if it's going to harm them, their grandchildren or their children, if it's going to bite them and they want to know a little bit about the behavior and the lifecycle," says LaFaive. "The thing about spiders is, if they're in your home, they're feeding on something and most likely insects, so why do you have high insect population?"
Besides phone calls, LaFaive says people also bring spiders in.
"I saw some big spiders come in this year, a couple of them, in the three years that I've been here it's the first time I've seen this particular spider come in, and I had two in one season," says LaFaive.
Majors says calls are up five to seven percent at his business this year because of spiders. He says most of those are from homes near rivers and lakes.
Majors says if you don't want to use pesticides to get rid of spiders, applying soap water to the spider can also get rid of them.
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