Dealing with the Brown Recluse Spider

Our home was built in 1916. It’s beautiful, with original hardwood floors, 12 foot ceilings and gorgeous wood trim. However, one thing that came with our house that we weren’t counting on is an infestation of brown recluse spiders.

I’m not going to lie – I have a pretty severe case of arachnophobia (fear of spiders). Mind you, I can kill one if I need to when my husband isn’t around, but I must do it with a shoe that has a flat sole, so I can get it on the first blow and it won’t sneak through the cracks (can you tell I’ve thought this through a bit). And even then I still pick the “dead” spider up with a piece of toilet paper and flush it down the toilet, just in case it wasn’t totally dead, so it will drown.

BR size

Personal Encounters
Last year I had a horrible encounter with a brown recluse while pregnant. No, it didn’t bite me, but it should have. Chalk it up to divine intervention — I got lucky. I was in my kitchen, putting away dishes when I felt a hair out of place tickling my back. So I reached back over my shoulder to brush the hair out of the way, only to see a monstrous brown recluse fall to the floor. What followed was a full blown panic attack. My husband killed it, but it took me several minutes to calm down.  Pregnant and bit by a brown recluse are not a good combination.

Since that time, there are glue traps in every corner of every bedroom in our house. I check them occasionally to see if they need replacing. Recently I checked the trap under my six month old’s crib. There were seven brown recluses in it, several of which were babies, meaning a nest was somewhere in the walls of his bedroom. Cue the panic attack again.

BRs are yellow to brown in color

What Brown Recluses Look Like
Brown recluses are, of course, brown in color. Their body has two segments and there is a darker pigmented violin shape behind the eyes. Keep in mind that only full grown BRs have the violin – babies may not have the pigment discoloration. While I could go into the details like the fact that the brown recluse only has six eyes (instead of eight), hopefully you won’t get close enough to examine that fact or other minute details. At least not until it’s dead, anyway.

Where Brown Recluses Live
Just as the name says, brown recluses are extremely reclusive. While the females do build webs, you’ll rarely (if ever) see one because most brown recluses live inside structures. In our case, they live inside the uninsulated walls of our turn-of-the-century home, so finding them in their “home” setting is a near impossibility. You’ll also find brown recluses in neglected boxes, usually in the attic or basement. In fact, their favorite places are the wood framing of basements, attics and crawlspaces. Occasionally they may infest furniture as well.

Where BRs live

The Nature of the Brown Recluse
Brown recluses only come out at night, and even then it is usually just the males that come out to hunt for prey (the females usually just wait around in the web). There are several disturbing facts about brown recluses that make them even more terrifying for arachnophobes like me, including:

• BRs can go months without a meal
• BRs love hot, dry conditions (which is why attics are their favorite place)
• Female BRs only need to mate once in order produce offspring their entire lives
• Female BRs can produce more than 150 young per year

The Brown Recluse Bite
The reason I fear brown recluses above all other spiders (even the black widow) is a combination of their reclusive nature and the disgusting and debilitating effect of a brown recluse bite. When a brown recluse bites a human, the poison spreads quickly and, within hours, the tissue at the wound side can go necrotic and die. However, this is often in extreme cases. Sometimes the wound gets no worse than a hornet sting, but it depends entirely upon how much venom is released into the bite and how sensitive the recipient is to that venom.

Brown recluses are not aggressive and only bite as a defense mechanism. That said, the most common ways people get bit are:

• Putting on clothing that was on the floor overnight, where a brown recluse crawled in to hide
• Perusing through easily accessible boxes and other items that go neglected for long periods of time without gloves or extreme caution
• By allowing bed linens to touch the floor, inviting a brown recluse to crawl up them and hide in your bed
  

  a bad BR bite

I personally know a couple of people who have been hospitalized for brown recluse bites, with significant scaring and damage done at the wound area. It’s no laughing matter and, while some of the images circulating on the internet may not even be the result of a BR, you need immediate medical attention if you have the slightest inkling that the mark on your arm is the result of a brown recluse. You won’t generally feel the bite itself, but the wound will soon start to hurt. Other symptoms include:

• Redness, swelling and burning of the wound within an hour
• Over the next eight hours, the wound sight will increase in size and may blister like a pimple – sickness may set in by this point as well
• By 24 hours after the bite, the wound (up to 2 inches in diameter) becomes hard to the touch and may scab over
• If the wound turn purple in color, then the skin is likely becoming necrotic and will result in a bad scar

Generally, BR bites heal in about eight weeks, but that depends on the severity of the bite and the body’s reaction.

Eradicating the Enemy
Unfortunately, eradication is a lengthy and expensive process because brown recluses are very difficult to get rid of. You may have pest control companies tell you that you can spray for brown recluses, but this is not entirely true. The sprays that most pesticide companies use are distributed around baseboards indoors and along the outer edges of your home.

First, brown recluses don’t usually come into your home from the outdoors – most of the time an infestation occurs because a BR hitchhiked on old furniture, boxes, etc. brought into your home. Secondly, while brown recluses do travel along baseboards, this won’t get rid of an infestation because you’re not attacking the home front. Brown recluses usually live within structures, such as walls, and, unless you’re willing to drill holes all over the place to find them, pesticides alone won’t work.

BRs in a glue trap

Pesticides are just one item on a long list of things you must do in order to obtain control over a brown recluse infestation. Employee the following steps, together, to help eliminate the enemy:

• Remove clutter from places brown recluses like to hide
• Use plastic storage containers that seal tightly rather than easily accessible boxes
• Seal crevices in walls, furniture, doors, window frames, fireplaces, attics, crawlspaces, etc. to keep brown recluses from accessing them as hiding places
• Place glue traps (sticky traps) on the floor against baseboards to capture BRs “in their tracks” – best places are under and behind furniture (the more traps the better!)
• Target pesticides on cracks and voids
• Utilize residual pesticides or in powder form around areas were glue traps show a high infestation (just make sure kids and pets can’t get to them)

It may take months to see results of your eradication efforts, and you likely won’t get rid of the problem completely. But rest assured, even those living in homes with a large infestation rarely get bit if they take the right precautions to protect themselves from access areas that brown recluses like to hide.