I was mowin' the lawn for the first time at our new place this afternoon.

My property line buts up against a wooded area.

The guy who mowed it prior to me had a smaller, shorter mower so he could get under the trees. I have a Kubota tractor with a belly mower so I sit up higher and the roll cage hits the tree limbs.

I drove through a gi-norm-ous web of Wolf Spiders very similar to the one pictured below and the web caught on my frickin' roll bar and it draped from my head to the roll bar and stuck there. I had them crawling all over me and the tractor.



The neighbors must have thought I was nuts. I'm out there swinging my arms wildly, pulling web off me, swatting spiders, all the while my tractor is still moving ahead veering off to the right headed straight for the pond.

Now I'm so creepy crawly I could shave my head and scrape my skin off with a giant brillo pad and I still wouldn't get any relief.

I ... HATE ... spiders.

We had them in the house, they are actually everywhere down here this year because of the drought and hot weather. They move in doors where it's cooler when it gets this hot. I had the entire house sprayed before I'd move a single box in. These things are fearless. They'll sit there in the corner and hiss at you and stare you down man. They are frickin' nasty. And that picture doesn't do them justice. They can get 2 inches long and have two back legs like crickets and look like they could jump 10 feet if they wanted to.

Ahhh!

If that is approx the actual size, I remmeber moving from a rustic 3.5 acre home into our first suburban home and as I pulled out some drapes (given to us as a gift, that were stored in our old "back closet") to hang in the new house. A dude about that size and color was walking across them.

Freaked me out.

Not a fan of spiders either.

Man, I want to scrape my skin off just reading that.

Ya, that sure gave me the willies just reading it!

I finally found out just how effective one of those wasp traps could be.  I hooked in on a tree down next to the driveway near the street in the morning and, later in the afternoon, looked to see about 2.5" worth stuck in the bottom of the trap with about another eight flying above the pile.  There must have been at least three dozen in there and I didn't have any flying around my deck or windows all day (I DO NOT like flying, stinging insects).  Even the spiders are preferable to those nasty little guys.

I don't like em either.  having them all over me like you described would have really freaked me out, too!  that happened to me one time - walking thru the woods on a path and this egg sack in a spider web burst just as I walked under it and hundreds of tiny little baby spiders flew out and on me! 

gives me the heebie jeebies just thinking about that again!

Hi Bub, glad to hear that you didn't end up in the pond.



Down here we give the Wolf spiders names and rank them by the number of flies they eat for us.

:-)

We also have Yellow Orb Weavers out in the forest which get rather large, feel sort of spiky and have really tough yellow colored webs that stick to you and feel gooey yet tenacious. They have a habit of making their webs right across the trails as it seems the trails have become "flyways" for insects as well as paths for terrestrial traffic.



best regards,
mike




edit spelling

mike_mccue


We also have Yellow Orb Weavers out in the forest which get rather large, feel sort of spiky and have really tough yellow colored webs that stick to you and feel gooey yet tenacious. They have a habit of making there webs right across the trails as it seems the trails have become "flyways" for insects as well as paths for terrestrial traffic. 

:-)

The only worse than spider are leeches. In grade school a buddy of mine outside of Kansas City jumped into a pond to cool off from the day. I was about to join him when I noticed these 3 inch black things pressed all over his body. Probably 30 or more. Yeeeewwww. We spent 30 minutes picking them off.

I like spiders. They eat flies. I hate flies.