Tag: dusting

That ol’ chestnut

My son Jasper in an old photo that reappeared on Facebook recently. I have since discovered that disposing of house spiders outisde might not be the most humane thing to do after all!

I’ve had a couple of interesting spider-related experiences this week. The first was in a lofty old house which had vaulted ceilings, beautiful mature oak beams and hanging chandeliers.

The owner was apologising because she had noticed the amount of cobwebs dotted around the high beams and light fittings. She explained that the webs had quickly reappeared thanks to fact she had removed the bowls of chestnuts she usually kept around the house to deter spiders from setting up home.

“Are you sure it works?” I asked. She nodded emphatically and said the cobwebs had been absent while the chestnuts were in situ yet materialised very quickly after they’d gone. She believed the nuts emitted a pungent smell that was repugnant to our arachnid housemates.

I became very excited at the prospect of reducing my household dusting burden by the mere introduction of a few nuts, and checked whether she meant plain chestnuts or horse chestnuts. She used the plain chestnut and I vowed to find out more.

What I discovered was that whole, fresh chestnuts are surprisingly difficult to get from your local supermarket after Christmas. Thankfully, they are available online and I’m sure you could pick some up at a wholefood shop too.

The recommendation to use chestnuts to deter spiders has been around for a long time. The following was published in Nature magazine in May 1874: “Can any of your readers establish the truth of the following assertion? Spiders’ webs are never found upon beams from the Spanish or sweet chestnut tree, even when the timber is several centuries old. The keeper of the ruins of Beaulieu Abbey, in Hampshire, asserts that this is a fact, and the buildings of the Abbey, where beams of Spanish chestnut are used, are free from the invasion of spiders. His attention was drawn to this four years ago, and since then his observations have not thrown any doubt upon its accuracy.”

I could not find the answer to the writer’s question, but I have found several sources that say the claim has never been scientifically proven and is just an old wive’s tale. Some Cornish schoolchildren did their own experiment a few years ago with spiders and conkers which, along with walnuts, are also said to posses spider-repelling properties. However, the critters trotted merrily over the conkers, none the worse for being in contact with the noxious nuts. I will put some chestnuts around my house and see what happens. I’d love to know if you have tried it – or anything else – to keep your home spider and cobweb free.

The second spider-related incident came when I opened up Facebook and at the top of my feed was a picture of my son holding up his mobile phone upon which sat a huge eight-legged monster. It was a photo I had posted 18 months ago after having an unsettling encounter with the beastie. For some reason, a friend had recently commented on it which set off a whole new chain of reactions and comments from friends, some of whom hadn’t realised it was an old post, and that they had already commented when it originally appeared in 2024!

Despite the fact it was old news, it was fun to revisit it and read all the comments of horror, with some people suggesting that an arachnid of such proportions must have hitched a ride from a distant land. Our native house spider can grow surprisingly large and yet is harmless, while being really good at keeping down the population of other annoying pests like flies and mosquitoes.

During my research, I read something that made me quite distraught. We do not kill spiders at home, but capture them and deposit them outside on the assumption that it is the most humane way to deal with them. 

Apparently not. According to what I have read, house spiders cannot live outside for very long, so unless they are able to find somewhere warm and sheltered where they can spin a web to catch food, they will die.

If there is a spider scuttling about my bedroom, I will never be able to sleep, and yet, if I chuck it outside like I have been doing, I might be sentencing it to a lingering death.

So what the heck am I supposed to do now?

Do you have opinions, memories or ideas to share with me? Get in touch with me using the ‘Contact’ button on the top right.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 23rd and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 21st Jan 2026

No Leg to Stand On

 

IMG_4929
Daddy longlegs’ webs are rather scruffy compared to their scarier home-dwelling counterparts. But these harmless creatures can help keep the scarier spiders at bay

 

I hope you weren’t too disturbed by my column about house spiders last week. It’s funny how seeing just a picture of an eight-legged arachnid produces a physical shudder in many of us, so apologies for doing it again this week.

Our reactions go back to our evolutionary ‘fight or flight’ response. When we are under threat, our brain floods our body with the stress hormone adrenaline signalling to our muscles prepare to either run away or stay and fight. It’s estimated that around 4% of us fear spiders and as a phobia it comes second only to snakes. If we are truly phobic it means that we are fearful to the point of irrationality, and the terror we experience far outweighs the actual danger posed by the object of the fear.

If you are worried about house spiders then I suggest you rein in your instinct to clean because they have a natural predator that loves nothing more than setting up home in the corner of your living room. The trouble is though (especially for arachnophobes), this helpful predator is yet another spider. In its defence it’s much less scary and, unlike the house spider, does not whizz alarmingly across your floor at the rate of half a metre a second.

This creature is a friend to all housework-shy humans, a regular resident of neglected corners, cupboards and attics and a weird-shaped spindly thing, the lazy old daddy longlegs. Compared to the clean and ordered webs built by swotty old regular spiders, the slovenly daddy longlegs’ home is a shambles and described as ‘untidy’ and ‘without great design’ by the Natural History Museum. I can relate to that, because it reminds me of my side of my dishevelled university room compared to that of my unnaturally tidy roommate.

The light brown DLL (how I will refer to the daddy longlegs from now on because it is too much effort to type it out fully) is characterised by its long dark two-part body of abdomen and paler thorax (head end) to which are attached its eight ridiculously long skinny legs. It originated in the Sub-Tropics and after hitching a lift on an England-bound boat, was first documented in the south of the UK in 1864. Once it worked out that to survive our much chillier climate it had to stay indoors, it dared to venture up north and is now common all over the country.

It relies on its web to do the heavy lifting where dinner is concerned, but if that fails, it will get off its idle backside to hunt food, which includes – arachnophobes take note – other spiders. In the entomological version of analysing the rubbish left outside MacDonalds, someone in Hampshire decided to count all the food waste discarded by the slothful DLL in the webs found in his garden shed. He discovered that of the 102 bits of leftover critter, 63 belonged to house spiders, six were DLLs, and the rest were mainly other spiders. How the DLL loves a spider-flavoured meal, even if it is their own sister.

There are a couple of other minibeasts that we also refer to as ‘daddy longlegs’, but they are distinctly different. You will likely have seen the harvestman in your garden, which from a distance looks very much like our DLL but is not actually a spider. Found outside among vegetation rather than indoors in webs, it has a teeny tiny bulbous single body and six long wispy legs. The other is the crane fly, that lanky-legged winged thing that looks like a giant mosquito and has a habit of bobbing into your room late at night to flap annoyingly round your lampshade. It may be the most stupid of creatures but its (literal) saving grace is that if it gets trapped by its dangly legs, they simply pop off and it bobs away again, unperturbed by the fact it is a leg or two lighter.

In conclusion, if you hate house spiders but can cope with the odd messy web of the slothful DLL, then perhaps you should welcome it into your home as your ally rather than your enemy.

But my educational takeaway from this column is that I now have a valid excuse to do even less dusting than I do already.

I’d love to hear from you about your stories, memories, opinions and ideas for columns. Use the ‘Contact’ button on the top right of this page to get in touch.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 20th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 18th Sept  2024.