Whenever I see widows in our garage or outside around the house I try to remove them since my stepdad sprays both those areas. I found this widow a couple weeks ago in the garage and left it alone until I heard my stepdad almost stepped on it a couple days ago - my sister told him I would take care of it so I moved it today. Thought I would share pictures of the removal!

And let me add that I do not promote people removing/dealing with these spiders unless they know what they are doing! These spiders (in my experience) have been easy to remove safely, but if someone doesn't have prior experience with other types of non-threatening spiders a widow is probably not the best place to start. All of the widows I have removed never showed any signs of aggressive behavior and most played dead at one or more stages of the removal which makes things very easy for me.

She was nesting up in the corner of the garage on the celling, the web led all the way down to the floor so the first thing I did was destroy the web leaving a 2 inch square around where she was curled up.



After I started to remove the web she immediately curled up



After that I got on a ladder I tried to separate the eggs from where she was, she got a little annoyed at that so I decided to use the broom to gently remove the eggs just in case she did decide to drop - I didn't want to be too close.





After I got the eggs down she got herself into the edge of the wall - I tried gently coaxing her to the middle of the celling with the broom so I could place a vase around where she was but she dropped instead.



After she dropped I gently blew on her which made her play dead, this allowed me to easily place a clear cup over here and slide thick paper under the cup then tip the cup over making sure the paper was held tight to the cup.







After getting her in the cup I took her out to the hay barn.



She played dead on the walk over and when I dropped her on the side of the barn.



After a little coaxing with the plastic knife I had with me she got up and ran under some barrels - thats the only time she ran while I was removing her. They are very fast!



The end! I've taken some out of more complicated places but this was my first one removed from a high place, and the only time I have ever used a broom, it worked out pretty nicely.

And as an added bonus.. I found this dead cicada outside of the garage