What’s Attracting So Many Spiders Outside My House?

9/16/2014

There are many things that draw spiders in. The most significant is their love for tasty insects. You might not think flying bugs are tasty, but spiders find them scrumptious. They will meticulously spread their web out in an arch, near an exterior light, and wait happily for those tender morsels to fly toward the light. If you have bright, white lights outside your home, you’ll have spiders for sure.

Flower beds and plants are notorious for drawing in spiders. A bee or wasp, snagged in a web, is a feast for an arachnid. They also enjoy the gamey taste of a succulent aphid, when they can get a hold of one. This is particularly helpful for plant lovers, because aphids destroy plants. If you have crickets chewing on your leafy plants, you’re likely to attract larger spiders, like the orb-weaver spider. These monster spiders can take out larger insects.

Another flying bug spiders can’t get enough of is mosquitoes. They’re delicious! If you have wet pools of septic water in your yard, or if you keep your yard moist a lot, you’ll have tons of mosquitoes, and the spiders will thank you for it. If you keep your yard dry, and fill watery areas with gravel, you’ll reduce those mosquitoes, and send a lot of those spiders packing.

If you are one of those people who loves to make fruit a display on your table, you are a prime candidate for spider problems. Not because spiders enjoy fruit, but because fruit flies do. If you keep that fruit in your fridge, avoid leaving banana peels and peach seeds laying out, and keep your garbage sealed in a can, you’ll avoid the fruit flies, and the spiders that eat them.

We’ve talked about diet, now let’s talk about habitat. Spiders love shade first, and moisture second. If they can find both, they’ll be like a kid in a candy store. They also like rot–most insects do. This makes an outside wood pile a prime target. This is like luxury apartment living for a spider and the perfect environment for female spiders to lay their eggs. Yuck! If you think one spider is bad, try 2500 spiders crawling around your house. Hitchcock would have a field day with this idea.

Female spiders nest and lay eggs under porches, in the moist soil of flower beds, under wet leaf piles, behind rotted wood, in the pocket of a cinder block, in the millions of nooks and crannies a ton of construction materials provide, and in rusted holes on the kids swing set.

Spiders come for many reasons, and many of those seem helpful, at first glance. Who doesn’t want less mosquitoes, flies, and aphids? But the goal shouldn’t be to have more creepy spiders crawling around–to reduce the population of all those other pests. Get rid of the things that attract bugs and reduce ALL the insects around your house. And, get a professional to use safe and targeted pesticides to keep your home nearly pest free, year round. You don’t have to live with insects. Let them live in nature, where they belong.

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