Spiders are my friends! As far as I'm concerned, the more the merrier. Fat spiders with short legs, skinny spiders with long legs, green spiders, yellow spiders... Seriously, though, as everyone else has said...you should welcome spiders to your garden. They're part of a healthy ecosystem, and they'll help to police all of the bad guys. I've really become an admirer of spiders since I began gardening a decade and a half ago, and I'm just as delighted to spy a new resident spider on of my blueberry bushes as I am to discover a pair of cardinals nesting in one of my pear trees.

Arachnids are a way of life on the desert where everything seems to bite you, sting you, stick you or rub off onto you with some level of toxicity. Tarantulas are a common sight in your yard and even walking down the middle of the street in the city, especially in the fall when males are looking for a little love. Without a monthly visit from the bug man there is nary a place that is not soon infested with black widows, brown recluse and wolf spiders that have a good start on getting as big as the tarantulaÂs. Then there are the ticks and scorpions. WeÂre even lucky enough to have the bark scorpion here, the only one in NA deemed dangerous to man (I got stung by one 30 years ago, bad, very bad). One difference here though here they tend to live inside your homes as much as outside it. This bungalow I live in now has more inside residents than outside I think, more than anyplace else IÂve ever lived on the desert. ItÂs to the point that I shake clothes and dump out my shoes before I put them on same as youÂd do on a desert camping trip. But, if you are going to live on the desert, you soon learn to accept all of these along with the rattlesnakes and some fairly nasty plants as just disinterested neighbors and pretty much ignore them. That is, if theyÂll let you. A few nights ago I was sitting in the recliner watching TV in the wee hours when something crawled across my bare chest in the dark. I swatted it to the floor, got up and turned a light on to see what it was. ItÂs the right size and color to be a bark scorpion, but I didnÂt bother to hunt for my keys to key it out to be certain. I would have simply took it outside and turned it loose, but I had hit it hard enough to kill it. About the 7th or 8th one in three months inside this place, and there has been a bunch of wolf and a couple of recluse spiders IÂve had to show the door. No black widows inside yet, but when the rains startÂ

I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around the description: 'orange-looking-spider-thingies'. Could you be more specific or better yet, let us see a picture? There are actually quite a few possibilities, aphids being one. I wouldn't worry about them until you find out for certain that they are causing problems for your plants. They might actually be on the job, patrolling for 'real' pests.

And this is what spider looked like after I killed it... more like screamed for my mom to come downstairs and she after about 5 minutes of attempting to squish it finally succeeded and it moved around alot and fast kept crawling up and down on fireplace mantle.... while she tried stabbing it with a pool stick from the old pool table near by... and told me she cant do it was afraid to get a shoe or something to get close to it I yelled I am moving out today if we don't kill this now ! Lol finally we got an idea and sprayed it with some kitchen cleaner and it slowed down long enough for her to kill it . Wish I had better pics but was so freaked put when I saw it I only snapped the one very quickly just in case I lost it before it had a chance to be killed and only have the phone photo of it dead to try to help identify it.. I been reading thru a lot of thread like these I know this one is old and I've been rambling quite a bit but hope someone takes time to read and respond....