That poor pest control guy did not know what he was getting into, but given the state of my yard i feel like he should have known what he was getting into.
He was going door to door offering to spray the base of the house for pests for a discount rate because one of our neighbors signed up for pest control and he walked down my driveway (covered in spiderwebs), up onto my front porch (covered in spiderwebs), and knocked on my door (covered in spiderwebs) and said "hi, I'm John from the bug company, would you be interested in a discount service because it seems like you may have a spider problem."
And I said, "oh, no, I'm sorry, I won't be spraying for spiders, I like them. I want to encourage them."
And he gave me kind of a weird look and was like "why?" And I was honest and said that they were my pest control, they take care of my mosquitoes and and and flies, and then I kind of laughed and said that I should stop because I know way too much about spiders and if he let me go I'd talk his ear off.
And then he made his fatal mistake and asked what I knew about spiders, and if I knew what kinds of webs he'd walked past to get on the porch and what spiders were in my yard.
So then he got to hear my thoughts on brown vs black widows and why I wished there were as many black widows as there used to be but I had a big beautiful one under my patio table right now and even if I prefer black widows because they aren't invasive the same way that brown widows are i still like the brown widows and i had a lovely one who lived in my patio chair from August until the firestorm in January and she was so good and kept eating cockroaches and had made five big egg sacks and how I was so proud of her and I used to have a lot more orb weavers but their numbers never recovered after the tropical storm last year but I had a cute one on the shed that I took a picture of yesterday and of course there are tons of wolf spiders and jumping spiders and cellar spiders if you wanted to count them too and some false widows but I hadn't seen any of them this year and, well, yeah, anyway they're not actually dangerous mostly and widows want nothing to do with you but a bite wasn't pleasant but much better than a recluse bite but I almost never see recluses around here but i wouldn't, would I, because they're not called brown gregarious spiders, oh and there are black footed yellow sack spiders around and you don't want those to bite you but their little toes are so cute and I'm sorry, sorry, sorry like I said I can go off about spiders, but also I don't want to spray because I've got so many pollinators, I've got a whole wisteria vine full of carpenter bees, actually i saw a male valley carpenter bee last week, did you know they're golden and fuzzy? He was so cool! But, yes, sorry, I won't be spraying but thank you for asking, and I'm sorry I was the crazy spider lady at you!
Extremely adorable fuzzy little creature:
A large friend:
Look, this is basically a kitten:
A goth icon.
Strong, independent women that I don't want to fuck with.
They are delightful and they eat actual pests, I love them.
I had almost this exact conversation with the door-to-door pest control guy last summer, but about the wasps. He was outright confused when I told him that not only was he not welcome in my yard, I'd just put out some fried chicken crumbs for my paper wasps to make sure they built their hives on my property because nothing in his truck made better crop pest control than a hungry nest of Red Paper Wasps, except maybe Ichneumons but have to get rid of the lawn before those will move in-
"Red Paper wasps? Those are very dangerous! They're very aggressive!" he sputters.
"Really? They seem to be quite placid." I indicated the Fine-backed Red Paper Wasp nest about 16 inches above his head under the eaves.
He stared.
I picked up a crumb of KFC from the porch shelf with my finger and held it up. One of the ladies investigated, then landed and sat on my finger and munched happily for a few seconds before returning to the nest.
"Would you like to see the common paper wasps? They've got a great nest going on the side of the garage."
"I'm. I'm good." He said, and left.
