While walking our kids to school one morning, I yakked with another Dad about the recent abundance of spiders (he was pulling a web from his hair). He said, “We put chestnuts around our house to keep spiders away.” I’d never heard of this before. He acknowledged the weirdness of the idea but insisted on its efficacy.I crawled around the Web and found various versions of this kind of spider repellent, not only chestnut but also horse chestnut, walnut, or the large round fruit of the Osage orange tree. Still others suggested it was the wood, not the nut or fruit. I did not come across anyone mentioning the spikey casing still on. Maybe people with arachnophobia would just like to believe it would be that easy to keep spiders away.
In Britain, the notion may be more widespread. Their Royal Society of Chemistry held a contest to find the best evidence for or against the idea that spiders dislike conkers, which is what they call horse chestnuts.
The winning entry came from a grade five class from Cornwall. They showed that their spiders did not seem concerned about walking over conkers compared to other materials.
They were lauded for their efforts and sure it’s great that they aren’t afraid of spiders, but kids these days seem to get patted on the head for every little thing. I did not expect horse chestnuts to have any effect on spider behaviour, but I’m not sure the idea was tested sufficiently, as the Ranger’s Blog has pointed out.
1. Not all or even many of the spiders tested would occur in a house. So if the question is whether horse chestnuts keep spiders out of your house, it might be useful to find spiders that would be in your house. Here are some notes about some misconceptions people might have about spiders in BC.
2. Harassing the spiders may not be a suitable test of their substrate preferences. It would take longer, but it seems like you’d have to wait to see what spiders do over time. Something else I hadn’t realized before was that household spiders aren’t coming in from the cold and you aren’t doing them any favours by putting them outside.
3. Horse chestnuts are inedible, which may support the idea that they contain some chemicals noxious to spiders. Some have suggested you need to open the chestnut up or poke holes in it to take effect.
Even if it turns out that horse chestnuts or these other items do not have any effect, I am intrigued as to why people would believe this in the first place. I can imagine a situation where you might happen to have conkers around at the this time of year and the spiders disappear for other, perhaps seasonal reasons.
I have horse chestnut trees all down my street, and I don’t have many spiders in my house. If you have a lot of spiders in your house and would like to test chestnuts on them, then let me know in the comments and maybe we could collaborate.