Wes Mantooth

...Help?

Okay long story short, girl I'm sort of seeing is renting a house and it seems to have an inordinate amount of Black Widows hanging around. Personally I've killed around 8 or 9 in the last week or two including 4 in the garage (one hiding on a rake handle), another in the mailbox, one on the back porch, another coming out of the space between the brickwork...and you know, all of that is okay I don't mind spiders...but nothing will give you a case of arachnophobia like finding one crawling on the back of the toilet tank.

Now, I'm not too familiar with black widows, the worst I had growing up was those awful wolf spiders that hide in the wood pile...so I'm flying blind here. From asking around this seems to be a rather unique problem, I've never seen one at my place either. From what I've read they tend to flee from active houses but its pretty common to find them in vacant ones (her house was vacant for awhile before she started renting) but she's lived there for 6 or 7 months now and it seems to be a new problem (eggs hatched maybe?).

So I'm curious if anybody might know what attracts them or why they might be showing up in such large numbers? Perhaps before paying for an exterminator there might be a more cost effective solution? I sprayed around the house a few days ago with something I picked up from the hardware store (for the life of me I can't remember what it was, it did list widows on the label) Any advice would be great as I'm afraid I'm going to show up one day and find her dead on the floor from about 500 widow bites.

^ sorry very late and very over tired hope the above is make sense, forgot to ask earlier when I was actually awake.

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