Anyone suffering from arachnophobia is in for an unpleasant few weeks. Last years mild winter, outstanding summer and an unseasonably warm autumn coupled with an abundance of food for our arachnid friends to feast on has been an absolute blessing for the spider population! So those feasting on flies and bugs, are bigger than they have ever been, and now they are coming into our homes to find a mate and settle down and raise their spider families!

Spiders really aren’t interested in us at all. They tend to become more visible at this time of year as the males go on a hunt for females to mate with. After mating the males die and are often consumed by the female.

6,000 Spiders Invade Home

Yes there are horror stories in the press, recently a couple in the US were forced to abandon their dream home after it became infested with thousands of brown recluse spiders, an estimated 6,000 of them. Or the discovery of the world's deadliest spider lurking in some supermarket-bought bananas. It’s these kinds of stories that give these eight legged creatures a bad rep.

But is there anything to fear? Generally most spiders are harmless to humans. All spiders can inject venom with their bite - after all it’s how they kill the bugs and flies that become trapped in their webs. But the amount of venom needed to kill a tiny bug is insignificant when targeted at a human.

In fact, most British spiders have fangs that are unable to puncture human skin, making it impossible for them to hurt us. And of the tiny minority that can bite us, the effect is minimal. According to experts the false widow bite is no worse than a bee sting. Occasionally, the papers report someone in hospital after being bitten by a ‘false widow’, which has been at large in the UK since the late 20th century, but these cases are due to an allergic reaction and are very rare.

Fear of spiders is one of the most common phobias, with as many as one million people suffering from it in Britain. It is believed that the presence of spiders in your house is a sign that 2,000 fewer bugs per spider will be there every year. Every year, spiders around the world eat the equivalent weight of the human population of Britain in flies and other insects

Should however they still concern you, Antarctica is the only continent in the world where you can’t find spiders so you better start packing!