Topic about Spiders, ever been bitten, how bad was it?

When I was bricklaying with my father & bro they had put the banded bricks near the orchard. Cat Faces had built nests in the holes. I dislike spiders so most of my time was spent looking into the holes & trying to seal them up. Father was a little miffed at me but I avoided any bites. But now black widows are another story, you see one & there's no mistakening it for something else. We had brown recluses around our foundation but 'knock on wood' I've been lucky to avoid them.
 

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I'm not squeamish about touching most animals and insects but NOT spiders, centipedes, millipedes, slugs, and potato bugs.

As a kid, due to open construction at base floor level, spiders could easily enter one Sacramento Valley home I lived in. Among things I hated most, was waking up at night only to feel something crawling against my body inside bed sheets. Thus upon feeling anything crawling might suddenly rise up like a jack-in-the-box on steroids. Each night spiders would be crawling about on walls so I would tuck bedspreads up away from floors.

Worse for we kids was walking about in outdoor fields in natural areas and accidentally walking into one of those large garden spider circular webs that tended to set up in use pathways. Any kid that did so would run about waving arms, hands knocking anything on hair, like a chicken with its head cut off with any other nearby kids rolling on the ground laughing hysterically. Of all spiders, the scariest by far are black widows that are abundant in much of California with their Halloween like webs and small round yellow egg balls. It is about tropical vegetation areas like our southern Gulf states where web spiders get huge and scariest.
 

I never deliberately kill a spider, but at the same, don't cotton to them being in the house. If I see one, I try to get it in a small plastic container I have just for that purpose, then escort it outside and dump it in the bushes and let it go about its spidery business. Can't say I've ever been bitten, but I think my dad was once. He was moving some lumber stored under the front porch in the house I grew up. He felt a sting and in a day or two, it got red and swollen. I don't think he ever did anything about it and it eventually it resolved. But what can I remember - I was 5 or 6 years old at the time.

I guess I won't be getting Lady Emeraude spider slippers for Christmas.

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debodun said:
I never deliberately kill a spider, but at the same, don't cotton to them being in the house. If I see one, I try to get it in a small plastic container I have just for that purpose, then escort it outside and dump it in the bushes and let it go about its spidery business. Can't say I've ever been bitten, but I think my dad was once. He was moving some lumber stored under the front porch in the house I grew up. He felt a sting and in a day or two, it got red and swollen. I don't think he ever did anything about it and it eventually it resolved. But what can I remember - I was 5 or 6 years old at the time.
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I usually take them outside, too.

But there's a few common "house spiders" I leave alone. They don't live long, they eat insects I don't like having around, and, though some of them build little hammocks or hides, they're not web-weavers. Plus they've never found a mate, so there's never been a population boom, and they aren't bitey at all.

Unfortunately, if they're dumb enough to walk across the floor, my cat will torture and eat them.
 
Eupher said:
Horse flies annoy me so much I read up on them. They are apparently attracted to darker clothing and large, dark objects (like horses and cattle). When the temps get north of 70 deg. F., that's when they come out with a vengeance. As my vehicle is a dark gray color, I can't tell you how many times I'd pull up somewhere, park, and within seconds the vehicle is being divebombed. I hate those things with a passion.
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We have "yellow flies" here in Florida. They apparently have mandibles as powerful as a claw on a trash truck and they don't sting, they bite a chunk out of you.

Once, at the springs, one bit me on the rump, right through my bathing suit. There was a good-sized hole in the suit and a good-sized hole in my derriere, too. They must also inject some kind of toxin, also, because I got a big lump on the rump.
 
I've never been bitten that I know of, and never saw a poisonous one that I know of... until I moved to Virginia. I heat with wood part of the time and would have a log truck of dead logs delivered on occasion. While I'm sawing and splitting, I end up with mountains of split wood in the yard. So I noticed some webs forming in the wood pile in the yard. Nothing unusual about that, but when picked up one split piece to throw it in my pickup to start moving split wood to the shed, there's a big fat black spider. A black widow? I turn it over and there's the hourglass. I look up black widow on the internet. Yep, it was black widow. Kind of exciting.

During the course of moving the wood to the shed, I see maybe 50 black widows in the next three days. I don't know where the logs came from, but it must have been from a black widow breeding ground. That was 10 years ago, and I didn't seen another black widow until last year when I was catching my breath on a hiking trail, and I saw a single black widow scurry across the trail and under a pile of leaves.
 
debodun said:
I never deliberately kill a spider, but at the same, don't cotton to them being in the house. If I see one, I try to get it in a small plastic container I have just for that purpose, then escort it outside and dump it in the bushes and let it go about its spidery business. Can't say I've ever been bitten, but I think my dad was once. He was moving some lumber stored under the front porch in the house I grew up. He felt a sting and in a day or two, it got red and swollen. I don't think he ever did anything about it and it eventually it resolved. But what can I remember - I was 5 or 6 years old at the time.

I guess I won't be getting Lady Emeraude spider slippers for Christmas.

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If I owned a pair of these slippers, I would pass out cold LOL
 

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