719-661-5310In this blog, we will discuss what a very, very typical mountain spider infestation looks like inside a normal residential home, and a step-by-step process for how to treat a mountain spider infestation.
The Source of the Infestation: The Attic
In every single mountain spider infestation, the source is almost every single time populating inside the attic or the upstairs level of the house. Even a small attic still provides more than enough space for these mountain spiders.
How These Spiders Behave
These spiders are pretty unique. They like to pick one, maybe like a foot by foot area and they won’t leave that area for months in a row. They would love to hide in a crack. They do come in baby form. They may look cute, but you don’t want to mess with them.
Woodland Park, CO Spiders
A Couple of Hundred Spiders in an Attic
If you extrapolate five spiders found in a yard-by-yard area and apply it to the whole attic, some quick math will tell you that there are probably a couple of hundred spiders in the attic. That’s not good. Attics are attached to houses, and people live in those houses.
Clean Up the Clutter First
The number one thing you need to do to prevent these spiders from infesting your home further, and to be quite frank, is to clean up your crap. If you look around the house and there is stuff everywhere, you know what this stuff is to spiders; it’s just extra hiding spots for them. You can’t have this much stuff in your house.
If you have a mountain spider problem, the first thing you need to do before you call an insect and spider exterminator, before you start trying to spray it, before you do anything, is just clear out any stuff where the spiders can hide from the chemical and they can hide from people.
The Treatment Products
Use good old-fashioned pesticides and sprays and actually go ahead and knock down this spider population. You don’t need to use your home remedy, lemon juice or peppermint oil, to repel the spiders.
Please just call an exterminator or get some really strong, scientifically proven pesticides and apply them safely and as the label says, in your home. Using six different products to treat the house for mountain spiders: PT221L, Delta Dust, Transport, Gentrol, and glue boards. Spray around the outside perimeter of the house using a product called Talstar.
Treating the Inside of the House
Inside the house, use these four products: the glue boards, the PT221L, and the Transport and Gentrol mixed up. First things first, spray it around the baseboards of the whole entire inside perimeter of the house.
When putting out the glue boards, the first and obvious thing they do is that when a spider gets caught on one, it will starve and be dead soon after it gets caught, but the second thing it does is it helps monitor what areas of the house might need special treatments.
For these mountain spiders, place one glue board in each of the main rooms, such as one in each bathroom, one in each bedroom, and one in the living room. You put them against the wall and on the ground so that one side is facing the wall and one side is on the ground, preferably at the back of the room, kind of out of the way, where no one’s going to get into it.
The final thing inside the house is to use a can of general pesticide concentrate. This is going to allow you, with the rod especially, to get in some of those cracks. One of the most common areas, for example, under almost all door frames, there’s going to be a gap.
Spray this stuff in there and it just comes out as a liquid, and go around the whole house and spray this stuff around cracks where mountain spiders may potentially be hiding.
Treating the Attic
Spray some of this strong stuff around the cracks, which will help prevent any spider bites. The main thing to treat the attic for mountain spiders is something like this Delta Dust, which, as the name might imply, is a dust.
It’s not going to be a 100 percent proof treatment because there’s so much crap in the attic. You can barely see it, but that stuff that just flew out, that is an insecticide that is going to kill these spiders, which are not insects by the way, but it is still going to kill them. Puff this stuff in the attic. Use a respirator, of course.
Spraying the Outside Perimeter
The final thing is spraying the outside perimeter of the house with general pest spray. This will somewhat help with the mountain spider infestation directly, but indirectly it will help a ton because it is killing off any insects that are also happening to get in the house, which is the food source for these mountain spiders.
Why Mountain Spiders Are Such a Problem
The reason mountain spiders are such a problem is that these spiders behave in such a manner that puts them into a category, structural pests. This spider species, the way it behaves, actually can, will, and wants to be inside a structure.
There are a couple of unique traits that this spider has that other spiders don’t that actually enable this spider to breed and populate and expand in population inside just an average person’s house. That is definitely a problem.
FAQs
What do mountain spiders eat?
They do feed on other smaller insects. If you can eliminate the food source of a pest, you have a very high chance of eliminating the pest population as well.
Are mountain spider bites common?
Mountain spider bites are actually super rare. They happen most of the time when people are pulling stuff out of their attic and their attic was infested with spiders and they really just had no idea.
What does a mountain spider molt look like?
Sometimes, when you are inspecting these spiders, you’ll see something that looks kind of like a spider. That is the molt, that is the old skin that the spider sheds as it starts to grow.
