Tractors and wood! Show your pics

[LouNY]

I would say a Black Widow spider.

 

[WinterDeere]

I would say a Black Widow spider.

That's the one!

Never even heard of anyone being bit by one, locally. I do know a few people who have suffered the disfiguring and nearly-crippling bites of brown recluse, although they're also pretty rare, here.

 

[mike0000]

You get those up in IN, too? I see them very occasionally here in recent years, but they're not very common this far north.

We definitely do, I’m in the southern part of Indiana, just north of Louisville Ky. They are fairly common to encounter around here, unfortunately.

Mike

 

[WinterDeere]

Thankfully, they're distinctive and scary enough that most probably know to avoid them. I suspect the reason brown recluse bites are more common here, despite both being not too common, is that the BR's tend to hide in places you'll be blindly reaching, like the back of a seldom-used closet or overstuffed cupboard.

 

[walhondingMF]

Have both here as well. Far more bites from the brown recluse though. Have found 2 black widows on my property.

 

[ning]

No brown recluse in CA, but we definitely have black widows. They like it dark and woody for the most part.

The outside man door for our garage wasn't used for a while and one day I went through it and caught a faceful of a strong spider web. Startled the heck out of me. Luckily the spider - black widow - was up in the corner of the door. My trusty bernzomatic made short work of it. I used to regularly see them in my little well pump house as well, but haven't for a while, probably since the frogs moved in.

Many people seem to mistake the garden spiders and wolf spiders for brown recluses...

A couple weeks ago I thought I'd been bitten by something while walking through the dead grasses as one evening I suddenly noticed a huge swelling on top of my foot (I'm often in flipflops here....). No itch, no sign of bites, just half of a golf ball sized swelling. Realized after a couple days it was actually "ganglion cyst"; it's gradually disappearing...