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Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Ben’s pest control podcast. And today I want to do a podcast on black widow spiders. Now here in the south, is as far as where we’re at in Florida, we actually have both the Black Widow and more commonly found the southern Black Widow, which is actually strangely enough kind of brownish in color. The one thing that both have in common is that they have the same body shape, and they will always have the hourglass underneath them. One of the other ways that we commonly tell the black widow spider in this area is by its nests. The eggs that they lay, in my opinion almost look like almost like the underwater mines you see in World War Two, where they’re kind of yellowish white cream colored balls that seem to have little spikes on them. And they will have a nest and they will have those egg sacks usually right in their web nearby. Now, one of the things I like to tell people is that just like the stories the the female and the male mate, and in some cases, the females will eat the males to give them nourishment to go through the process of the egg laying. So that’s not exactly a fable. It doesn’t happen every time. But it does happen. So for a lot of people, they’re wondering, well, how common are the black widow spiders, I can tell you, when I started my company and the Treasure Coast back in 2002, the 349, a three zip code, we found quite a few black widow spiders. And then we kind of went through a stretch where it just didn’t seem like they were quite as commonly found. Now just in the last couple of weeks, we got a call from a warehouse facility that stated they were infested. And I went out to take a look at the warehouse and they were not kidding. This, this building, I’m going to slightly guess had at least 1000 If not in the low 1000 Number They were everywhere we look there were just black widow spider nests. And they were found in the in the building they were found on their equipment. And the the owners of the building, were starting to get concerned that if they didn’t do something one of their employees was going to get bitten by the black widow spiders. And that was a very relevant concern. So now this warehouse building I want to say is probably between two and three storeys tall. And one of the things that I was able to share with them is yes, black widow spiders might go higher up. But for the most part, they like to stay lower to the ground. And I was even able to send them a note from the University of Florida, where they have a page on the black widow spiders. And it does say that their preference is to stay lower to the ground. So now before I go further, a little note on that. One of the things I was always told was that people need to be very careful of shoes. If you have a black widow spider problem, they strongly suggest that you don’t leave your shoes outside at night. I guess it is quite common that the black widow spiders will go in shoes and they’ll make a nest and you’ll be in for quite a shock when you put the shoes on. I personally don’t think that would be something if I could avoid that I would want to risk having happened to me. So let me get back to the to the warehouse or the factory. In this property. They were found on literally railings. They were found on the walls. They had a booth and the booth was made out of these metal panels. They actually had lifts and the lifts were bolted down to the floor. They were like five ton lifts that carry material throughout the building. And every leg every post, it seemed like there were black widow spiders, we found them on the garbage can. We found them all over this structure. And we went out we did a treatment for them two weeks ago and sprayed the inside of the building the outside of the building. We sprayed all the offices. This particular building has I want to say about seven offices. I call them offices but in some cases they’re just utility rooms break rooms. And
so they have all these rooms that we treated in the rooms as well. We did find some webbing and now As in the offices, but most of them were inside of the warehouse in the industrial building, and then on the outside of the building. So we did a very thorough treatment inside and outside, mostly from about five feet down. And we went back this week, we followed up, and they were very, very pleased with the results they got just after one week. But hopefully, the most important thing for them is that we were able to give them some peace of mind that hopefully the employees aren’t going to be working around this all the time. And at least at this point in time, they’ve hired us to treat the building every month. And we’re actually going to go back next week. That’s how bad they were, we’re going to go back for a third week in a row, just to follow up on our second treatment from last week. Or I’m sorry, from this week, when we went out this week, after we inspected the inside, we still found some of the black widow spiders inside the structure. But I would say we only found probably about 20 or 25, which for the size of structure it is and for the area that we were covering. I mean, the decrease in those spiders is amazing. And I can’t say 100%, where I think the black widow spiders came from. But in this building situation. It’s a relatively new building, I believe it was built within the last couple of years. And that had been a wooded area. So the company had torn down the woods, they built this building. And I can’t say 100% But I believe there’s maybe a chance that the spiders were well established in the wooded lot. And when they took the wooded lot down, the spiders got in. That’s one theory I’ve got. Another theory that I have in this situation is we we do and have service another company very similar to this company for years. And they actually went through a problem with black widow spider. So where their materials come from, it’s also possible that that plant or or factory, wherever they’re coming from, possibly has an issue. And as they get new product in, they could be living in that product. And when they got there, they got established in the structure and, and just did extremely, extremely well and thrived. So the big thing to understand is that black widow spiders are poisonous, they pose a threat. And now, from what I’ve read, they claim that they don’t believe that the venom from a black widow spider is necessarily deadly. But the truth of the matter is, it doesn’t matter if it’s if it’s not deadly to the majority of people. If you’re the wrong person and you have a reaction to that, it’s going to be irrelevant, you could die from it. So it’s something that you do have to take very seriously. You just do not know how an individual is going to react to a bite until that bite happens. And in some cases, that’s just too late. So why risk it and so we got to treat it. Now I will say if you’re a person who has any concerns about black widow spiders, I would strongly urge you to give us a call our phone number is 772-878-1972 or you can contact us via our website at WWW dot Benz pets dot biz. And I hope you found this information helpful for you. And you know again, if you do have any questions, give us a call. We’ll be happy to come out and do a free inspection for you take a look at your property and and see what we see that we can help you with. All right, thank you and have a great day.
