This very popular blog post has been refreshed and updated for Spring 2024 (and thereafter).

Photo caption: A legion _{(not an army, but part thereof!)} of sugar ants committed mass suicide in my bottle of honey. In honour of those that might resurrect – I can see some of them will – I pooled it in the sink and gave them a chance to extract themselves (and several did). A few less foolhardy brothers and sisters are supping from the edges.

It’s spring again— and people don’t know what to make of the teeny-tiny ants that march indoors like school children on spring and summer days (when they should be outside!). They can’t be mistaken for carpenter ants. But, unfortunately for them and all the other ant species that aren’t carpenter ants, all searches end up on results about killing them. As if they were as dangerous as carpenter ants. Carpenter ants won’t hurt you, but their infestations are dangerous to your house – they devour wood.  They’re the only ones you need to be vigilant about. (OK, maybe fire ants too, but usually they’re outdoors, minding their own business).

Common talk, mass media, and the extermination industry has effectively enabled people to think that insects are disgusting and undesirable. This is just flat-out wrong. Bugs aren’t your enemy. All it takes to realize that, is to observe them objectively, doing nothing but watch—and if that isn’t enough, it always helps to do a little research.

Of course, when you try to do some research, you have to get past the “get rid of” them websites. The truth takes lot more digging. So that’s what this blog post is about.

So, those teeny-tiny ants you see in spring, visiting your plants, maybe visiting the fruit on your kitchen counter? The name of this kind of ant is Tapinoma sessile. Here’s the path I took to research it some more:

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This year I decided to take the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s challenge and do a biological census of my front and back yards. It’s an event where you use the iNaturalist app to record as many species as you can find-and-identify in your own back (front) yard. Sign up and get your instructions here.

If you happen to be in my area (Little Burgundy, le Sud-Ouest, Montreal), then you are welcome to come by and discover even more, because I’m expecting to have no shortage of plants and insects to identify. Seek, an ID app by iNaturalist, will be useful for this, and I have some ID books on hand as well. Just send me a message or knock on my door, if you know where I am/can find me (I’ll be writing #NCCBioblitz on the sidewalk outside, and using the hashtag and location on my Instagram posts. I may even be outside doing it.

Sorry (not sorry) if you might be a tad arachnophobic, but here’s the thing: I was terrified of spiders as a kid all the way through to some point of being a grown-up. It was after being a grown-up. When I was 23 or 24, I made a boyfriend check and check again regarding the presence he’d reported of a giant wolf spider in the bathroom. “It was THIS BIG!”… and thankfully it got out of there before harm came to it. Whatever you feel as an arachnophobe, I have felt it too.

And what fixed that? Looking at spiders and learning about them, and having so very few actual bad experiences and spider bites. It’s like every bite when I was a child could have come from a black fly or mosquito (horse flies: the worst!), but just like I was the family scapegoat, I devolved scapegoating onto whatever spider was at hand. Poor things.

The start of this arc of moral development was house-painting as a teenager, when I painted the leg of a daddy long-legs (they escaped my hideous fear), and watched it carefully clean its leg off. That’s when I realized they have worries of their own. It was the dawn of my waking up.

So now, when I’m on the boat, I have a rule: leave the spiders alone or put them out on the dock. If you encounter one while on the water, then trap it for the trip, and release it at the end.

And in my house, I have a rule: All rooms can have a resident spider, but one per room. Except that I hardly enforce it. I’m really lazy about enforcing it for daddy long-legs, and just keep an eye out for the other, speedier kinds (the pale yellow house spider, unidentified, others). And yes, I have to dust for cobwebs a few times a year.

I always put these guys outdoors simply because I think they’ll have an easier time hunting:

I tend to leave the screen off my kitchen and bathroom windows, so occasionally, I get a resident window-sill spider. These are speedy little predators who are very shy around people. Mostly. They tend to be more outgoing at night.

If the spider count in a location is too much, I move the spider elsewhere. Usually outdoors if the weather is ok, but in winter, I move them to the garage or the cold cellar.

Windowsill Sentinel spiders

Back in 2012 I started this blog post about my Kitchen Spider who, of course, I named Charlotte. Here she is, in the kind of photograph I had of that time:

Charlotte’s web had a collection of prey (visible), but also its previous moult exoskeleton (out of frame). I was really quite surprised how small she was when she started out — she was a very tiny spider. She found a good home there.

You’ll see that there’s greater clarity in a circle around the spider. This is the funnel of the web. Charlotte was a very subdued presence on the window sill, hanging out at the mouth of her cave but retreating whenever I startled her. When she was bold enough to come out of her cave, her leg span greater than a 25¢ piece. 

Soon, after more than a week without prey, her web wound around the frame of the window and various objects, and she even got off the window sill and wrapped a new web around the — I kid you not — handle of the kitchen faucet. I’m telling you this because many years hence, another kitchen spider did the same thing!

The first morning I just removed the web, but on the second morning, I felt a little sorry for her because the energy expenditure to do that work must mean she was hungry. I left the web intact, and just handled the faucet when I needed to use it. But eventually, the web tore off. So she moved her web over to the left corner of the window, which was a better spot for her.  

Here’s a gallery of the Kitchen Sentinel spider:

And upstairs, this year, I had a gregarious spider who even allowed a friend of the same type to hang out for a couple of days (I had to rescue it out of the bath and put it out the window, though). We’ll begin and end this gallery with the fabulous expanse of its web.

This kind of spider is called a Barn funnel spider in North America and a Domestic house spider in Europe; they look much scarier than they actually are – they are shy, opt to flee, and if they bite, they don’t even break the skin. So I still get the squeamish “don’t touch me!” feeling when I get close to one, but knowing these things about them I try to leave them in peace and not disturb them. For example, in the garden, I have to watch the plants for the funnel webs they create between plant leaves and other objects.

This lucky spider, here, is one that set up shop on my potting table. It even managed to drown itself in the sink during a rain. I removed it, placed its body back in the funnel web, and two days later, it was back as if nothing ever happened.

The orb-weaver spider

These guys are my second-favourite. In September until the frost comes, I won’t cross any area they’ve cordoned off with one of their webs. Including the patio door, which means I have to go downstairs to go out the back door.

The orb-weaver typically weaves a web between plants in meadows. Because it’s so energetically costly to weave a web, I’ve noticed that if one gets torn down by Big Clumsy (me, another animal, a bird), the spider will rebuild it with a zig-zag pattern. They will also consume their web and built it anew overnight, if it’s not fresh enough. I read once on the BBC website about bird-safe glass inspired by orb-weaver webs: apparently the silk contains proteins that show up in UV light so that birds don’t fly through in pursuit of insects.

And I even found a gravid spider hiding in the curl of a sunflower plant, in the autumn:

My favourite: jumping spiders!

On Jim McCormack’s  birding blog, the post “Jumping spider!” jumped right out at me. (He always matches the enthusiasm nature calls for.) “Cute” is definitely the word I apply to jumping spiders. They’re tiny, and curious, and I just like them. Here’s a great macro picture of a little guy in side-eye “you lookin‘ at me?” mode.

Check out this super-cute (even if old) video of a curious jumping spider!

These spiders are everywhere, perfectly harmless, and at times perfectly helpless. I accidentally killed one while cleaning the bay window shelf, and I felt so, so bad. Now I will always be more attentive than I was that day, as that’s one place they could make a permanent home. Provided they’re safe from Big Clumsy.