[stirfrykitty]

Spiders don't stand a chance against orange oil concentrate. It handily kills them right along with every other crawly thing. I won't spray the ones that stay up high, but if you've ever seen a Wolf spider in your house, you'd spray them, too. They can get rather large. If only I could convince my wife to move someplace civil like Vermont or just slightly east of Seattle, like Issaquah or Snohomish. Texas has too many critters. Where I live, the coons will attempt to gain entry into your trash cans, the possums will be under your cars and hiss at you, the snakes are ever present. Just down the street from us, a family killed two water moccasins in their back garden a couple of weeks ago. They also have seen several copperheads. Both are venomous.

[k_sze]

I forgot to advocate for the spiders, again, except the really nasty ones. E.g. during damp seasons, I catch and deploy jumping spiders into my daughter’s room as a method of biological control against book lice.

In my opinion, if you have any kind of spider infestation on your property, then you have something else to worry about. Spiders need food to thrive, which usually means insects or other arthropods, which in turn means you have an infestation of other arthropods.

So why are you having a bug infestation in the first place? Are you leaving food crumbs all over the place? Do you have damp places where fungi and moss will grow? Insects and all kinds of critters really like those conditions. If you fix those, your insect and (consequently) spider infestation will most likely be gone.

In the case of mosquitoes, we are the food, so you can’t fix that, but you can clear out bodies of still water, which will decimate the number of mosquito larvae.

Killing them (with insecticides) only fixes the symptoms, not the root of the problem.

[ssully]

I have lived in or just outside of Chicago my entire life, and the worst critter I've encountered are centipedes, which I handle incredibly poorly. I honestly don't think I would manage well with encountering snakes or wolf spiders with any frequency.