Western Black Widow

I always wear gloves now when handling or moving large plastic pots - I have found several widows under the rims of 10 & 15 gal. nursery pots.

We have a hard rule about handling the wood pile without gloves because we have so many black widows. But last week I was cleaning up a silver sage (salvia argentea) and there was a huge black widow, full of eggs, hiding among the large leaves.

I generally wear garden gloves, more happily now that the nitrile ones are available and can protect my hands without a loss of dexterity - but glove are now the rule for all clean-ups where there is leaf litter and for reaching into or under plants to clean up old foliage.

I'm surprised that none of my cats has ever been bitten - in fact, they seem to eat black widows with no consequence. Anyone know anything about this?

This is probably, next to ants, the most common 'bug' in my relatively new yard. There are hundreds of them out there, and though I know they are potentially quite toxic, they are very shy (never even see them in the day) and seem reluctant to go after anything that REALLY moves their webs (like my fingers). And are pretty good about catching 'bad bugs'. Their webs bug me more than they do, actually. Their webs are some of the ugliest, sloppiest webs in the spider kingdom... no apparent pattern or design, and always where I weed, creeping me out as I grab a handful of grass or milkweed, and pull up more than I bargained for (like dead bug parts, webbing etc.). They make large nests full of 1-2cm fluffy white spheres simply loaded with spider eggs, that periodically open releasing a g... read moreazillion baby black widows (yuk). So I do remove the egg 'balls' when I see them (obviously I miss a lot of them or there wouldn't be so many spiders in the yard).