Around 30.5% of individuals in the United States alone suffer from a fear of spiders, otherwise known as arachnophobia. Even without this fear, dealing with spiders in your home can be such a frustrating struggle. These nasty creatures can hide anywhere from under your bed to your shower curtain to the corner of your home walls.
So how do you deal with a spider infestation? You can do damage control with spiders by keeping your place tidy and sealing the cracks in walls. You can also stop spiders from infesting your area by shutting off the lights since spiders love eating these bugs that are attracted to house lights. Lastly, if the spider infestation gets too uncontrollable, it’s always best to call the professionals to ensure you eliminate them entirely.
How Do You Deal with A Spider Infestation
1. Keep Your Home Tidy
The clutter in your home can seem like a very attractive place for an occasional spider to hide, so it’s best to keep your home clean and tidy. This means avoiding having any food leftovers or food sources that an occasional spider can potentially get attracted to. Keep your food sealed at all costs and put them in a cold environment such as a refrigerator or freezer.
Find a way to clean your floors, tabletops, and walls regularly. You can also use vacuums to your advantage when eliminating spiders, spider webs, and their egg sacs, assuming that it isn’t a spider infestation.
2. Seal The Cracks In Your Walls
Spiders can enter narrow openings such as cracks, windows, doors, or any other gaps. However, it’s cracks you should pay most attention to as spiders tend to hang around in them. They use any kind of crack as a safe space away from their predators, and it acts as an advantage for them to prey on smaller insects. This is why it’s best to patch up the cracks within your home, especially those on walls and floors that are moist (e.g. bathroom and kitchen)
3. Shut Your Outdoor Lights Off
While this isn’t a permanent solution to dealing with a spider infestation, it can certainly help. Spiders are attracted to light because bugs are attracted to any form of light. You can either choose to shut off your outdoor lights altogether to reduce spiders getting into your home or replace your bulbs with a warm yellow bulb since they’re less attractive to bugs.
According to this source, warm yellow bulb lights have proven to be even better than bug lights, which are lights sold on markets claiming they don’t attract insects.
4. Spray Commercial Insecticides
If you want to attempt taking this into your own hands, then use a commercial insecticide. As long as the spider infestation within your home is under control, then you can always reduce or eliminate them through an insecticide. Compared to a commercial pesticide, an insecticide can kill certain insects and spiders. Find the source where spiders like to breed, such as corners and garages, as those are the places you should spray commercial insecticides.
Common Causes of a Spider Infestation
1. Food Source for Spiders
It’s not news that medium spiders are fond of bugs, so if there are several bugs in your home, there’s a massive chance there are medium spiders there too. There’s a reason why attics, basements, and garages are safe spaces for medium spiders. These are also the places where bugs tend to pile up and if medium spiders are in search of food source – and they successfully find one – then they found their new hiding spot.
2. Dark Spaces
If there’s anything that garages, attics, and basements have in common, it’s that they’re all dark spaces. These are very attractive to a common house spider as it allows them to spin their webs and camp out, away from predators and humans. If there is a lot of clutter in the dark spaces of your home, there’s a huge tendency for a common house spider to make that their new home.
3. Clutter and Mess
Having a messy and unclean home is very attractive to insects and spiders, especially as a couple of spiders tend to hang around clutter. It’s advisable that you vacuum, sweep, and dust regularly to keep a tidy house if you want to avoid a spider infestation in your home. You can also choose to vacuum a couple of spiders and their webs if you spot them around.
Obvious Signs of a Spider Infestation In Your Home
1. Webs
If you think that not seeing spiders around is a good sign, that isn’t the case. If you see more webs than usual without a spider, it’s a concrete sign of an infestation. You may also notice different spider webs in your home, which means that other species of spiders are infesting your home.
2. Eggs Sacs
Asides from webs, spider egg sacs are also commonly associated with the presence of spiders. If you notice hundreds of spider egg sacs around your home, this is a sign of a spider infestation in your home, and you need to dispose of them immediately. If there are hundreds, it’s always best to call in professionals to do this, as it can be overwhelming and out of your hands to do it alone. Mainly because if these eggs hatch, you have hundreds of spiders at your home, aside from the ones already there.
3. More Insects in Your Home
The more bugs and insects there are, the more likely house spiders would also follow. These are the primary food source for spiders, so it’s only natural that their presence is an obvious sign of an infestation. Watch out for not just bugs but also mosquitos, moths, flies, and other small insects that spiders could feed on.
4. Unexplained Bites
One of the characteristics of a spider bite is that it’s similar to other bug bites – itchy, painful, and inflamed bites on your skin. While most spider bites are typically harmless, watch out for dangerous spiders like the black widow spider. There should also be two puncture marks on your skin when bitten by a spider. Different types of spiders have other effects, so watch closely for any symptoms you feel after the bite. Dangerous spiders like black widow spiders have more harmful effects.
Solve Your Spider Infestation with Midway Pest Management
It’s important to know how to control an insect infestation, and before it gets out of hand, it’s best to call a pest control professional. Midway Pest Management is the best pest control company to call in the Kansas area to deal with any pest problem and damage control within your home. We have exceptional customer service: the minute you give us a call, we’ll accommodate your needs right away.
An infestation is something you should never take lightly in your home, and our team of experts can get your spider extermination taken care of right away. They can immediately spot the source and any signs of an infestation in your home. Most importantly, their background and expertise make them perfect for the job, proving to their clients that they’re nothing short of reliable and versatile in dealing with both commercial and residential pest control services and extermination services. We look forward to helping you solve your pest control problems. Contact us today to know more about our services.
Read More: Why Don’t Spiders Stick to Their Webs?