Is arachnophobia creeping up on you?
By Tom Gillespie
THERE'S lots of talk about bed bugs in Paris this week as rugby fans jet off for the Rugby World Cup.
However, closer to home, at this time of year spiders, of all sizes and shapes, become very noticeable in our households.
Most people, who suffer from arachnophobia, have a complete aversion to the creepy-crawlies and banish them from their homes.
However, spiders have an important role to play in controlling many pests that invade our homes.
Seventy-two years ago, on Saturday, June 2, 1951, The Connaught Telegraph published an interesting article by Julian Holyroyd taken from The Catholic Herald, headed ‘Spiders For Good luck’.
Julian wrote: For the past fortnight I have quite unashamedly preserved a large cobweb in a corner of my bedroom, for it is the home of a most elegant and industrious spider on whom I am counting for the destruction of the innumerable flies that so oddly chose these chilly days to hatch out.
If only the housewife’s objection to cobwebs could be overcome and, say one left in each room, spiders our most valuable allies in the destruction of a myriad of tiny insects, would have their useful lives preserved.
But no, a cobweb, it seems is a badge of shame, and all such must be ruthless swept away, and with them any occupant, and with them many an occupant clasping her eggs to her, is forced to run and seek shelter elsewhere.
The spider, whether it is our ordinary house variety or the more spectacular foreign body, is a most devoted parent; in time of danger her ball of eggs is always her first thought.
The Wolf Spider not only carries her eggs about with her in a neatly made silken bag, but from time-to-time turns the whole cluster so that each egg shall receive an equal amount of sunshine; then when the babies are hatched out, she will carry a score or so when she goes hunting, all of them clinging to the short hair with which her back is covered.
And when the young of our own common or garden spider hatch out, she feeds them from her mouth by hanging upside-down and regurgitating food for them. This she will do for a day or two until gradually weaning, when they can be introduced to a living meat diet.
It is curious that spiders, for which so many people feel such horrified aversion, should be universally considered ‘lucky’, and even those who shudder at their sights will not allow them to be harmed, solely on superstitious grounds.
In France, they carry the superstition further than we do, and hardened gamblers will take captive spiders to the roulette table as mascots; while snake charmers of the East have the palms of their hands tattooed with spiders as supposed safeguards against snakebite.
Between those poles of aversion and exaggerated respect, the spider spins her way, quietly rendering greater service than almost any other creature, and saving us, did we but realise the fact, whole bottlefuls of insecticide.
And the web of the spider, besides being a thing of astonishing construction and unique beauty, has other not generally known virtues, the chief of which is to supple the finest silk for dividing lines in precision instruments. It is also used in the manufacture of silken fabrics.
An old belief that it will stop bleeding is still prevalent among hedgers and ditchers who, if they cut themselves at their work, will look for ‘floss’ as instinctively as children hunt for dock leaves when stung by nettles.
There is no space to which the spider will not penetrate on her lawful occasions. They are to be found, as Dr. Bristowe points out, “wherever insects flourish or skulk. Search for them at the top of our highest mountain and you will find some of the 20 kinds which live nowhere else in Britain.
“Penetrate to the ends of our deepest caves or climb to rooks’ nests anywhere in the treetops and you will meet with spiders.
“Look in such unlikely situations as the interior of ants’ nests, where four kinds of spider have somehow acquired the position of tolerated guest.
“Walk among the plants growing on salt marshes and you see a Wolf Spider, which survives the spring tides by carrying a bubble beneath the surface.
“Hunt amongst weeds in our ponds and ditches for Argyronets, who stocks her diving belt with air carried thither entrapped around her hairy body.
“We can indeed claim that spiders have so adopted themselves as to pursue insects to the ends of the earth - and beyond.”
Spiders are susceptible to music, Saint-Sans is said to have played to them in his efforts to tame them and so overcome his own aversion; and Montaigne attributes ‘deliberation, forethought and conclusion’ to these small creatures.
The spider also has its place in legend, the most popular being that of the spider that spun a web over the mouth of a cave where the Holy Family was resting on the flight into Egypt.
When Herod’s men reached the cave and were about to search it, one of them pointed to the web saying that they would be wasting valuable time if the stopped to search a place so obviously uninhabited.
So the soldiers passed on their way, and Mary blessed the spider and said it should henceforth be allowed to spin its web in every home.
Please, then, respect your spiders. Remove them, if you must, from the dark corner under the stairs, but do not injure them.
Let them run off to construct somewhere else, and in an incredible short space of time, a home that for strength, labour-saving devices and exquisite workmanship, has nowhere in the world its equal.