Spider Control in Smithfield, VA

Smithfield Spider Pressure

Setting the Brown Recluse Straight

The recluse warning gets around, but it does not hold up in this part of the state. Virginia Tech places the recluse in Virginia’s far southwestern tip, nowhere near Isle of Wight County, and counts it as rare across the rest of the state, and its medically-important spiders guide explains that the wolf and grass spiders filling local yards are the ones people take for it.

The one that really warrants care is the black widow, and an old town full of sheds, cellars, and outbuildings hands it plenty of room: woodpiles, crawlspaces, and the shadowed corners around a historic lot. Given the chance it flees rather than bites, but a bite calls for a doctor.

The cellar, house, and wolf spiders you run into daily are harmless, just more plentiful where woods and water back up to a yard — which, in Smithfield, is most of them.

The historic core adds a second kind of habitat that the newer county does not have much of. A town with an unbroken run of buildings from the 1750s onward, and a surviving eighteenth-century courthouse complex, comes with brick piers, ventilated crawl spaces, cellars, smokehouses, carriage houses and garden outbuildings — sheltered, low, dark voids left undisturbed for months at a time. That is a black widow’s specification almost exactly. It is why an inspection in the old town belongs underneath and around the buildings and their outbuildings, while in the newer subdivisions the same species is far more often an outdoor, woodpile-and-garage problem.