False widow spider: Meet the incy-wincy terror whose range and reputation is swelling The 62-year-old, who is also education officer of the British Arachnological Society, has never been afraid of spiders. Some people are scared stiff of them. I can't understand it. It is a cultural thing that has been handed down - mothers say to toddlers, 'Don't go near that," and they immediately get a subconscious fear." He has never been so bombarded with anxious enquiries as in the past fortnight. Because we call them false widow spiders, people see a link with black widows, which they know are venomous. They are a distant cousin rather than a close relation, but everybody is going mad. The scare began last month when Alex Michael, a 36-year-old from Sidcup in south London, discovered that one was to blame for two puncture wounds on his hand. Then Steve Harris, a 22-year-old from Devon, was left with an open wound on his back when he was bitten in bed. A few days later, Ricki Whitmore, a decorator from Essex, claimed he was "lucky to still have my leg" after surgeons sliced it open when a bite made his thigh swell to twice its normal size. Layla Benton, a 14-year-old schoolgirl also from Essex, was next to be bitten. She spent a week in hospital with blood poisoning and will be left with a permanent scar. The panic reached its crescendo this week when the Dean Academy, a school in Gloucestershire, closed for the day after teachers discovered dozens of false widows in the classrooms. Pest control officers fumigated the buildings and found around 40 of them. Mr Bee says we have been living unwittingly with false widows for more than a century. The spider has been in Britain since the 1870s, when it arrived in Torquay, stowed in a banana shipment from the Canaries. However, it was not recognised as native until the Eighties. As recently as 2002, populations were only recorded in four places in Britain: Torquay, the Isle of Wight, Southampton and the Thames Estuary. Although there are no precise estimates, experts believe we must now shelter around 10 million. "They have become much more mobile because of climate change," says Mr Bee, explaining that our winters had previously been too cold for many to survive. There is a fairly wide distribution south of a line from the Severn to the Wash, and there have been reports in the Midlands and Yorkshire. We have noticed them in recent weeks because spiders begin to shelter indoors in October as cooler weather takes hold. It is also the month when male false widows are ready to mate. "They leave their webs, stop feeding and wander around detecting the females" pheromones," says Stuart Hine, who manages the Natural History Museum's insect identification service. This brings them indoors. They love conservatories and wardrobes. They get everywhere. Beverley Moore knows this more than most. The 51-year-old was bitten by a false widow in her summer house near Taunton a fortnight ago. She was kept in hospital on an intravenous drip for two days. "My finger was one and a half times the normal size," she says. It was really painful. To diffuse the panic, Mr Bee points out that spider bites are far rarer than bee and wasp stings. "This is the beast we are talking about," he says, scooping one up in a plastic tube and shaking it on to my hand. My first attempt to hold it fails immediately when it drops to the tiles and starts to climb up one of my shoes. Mr Bee captures it before it reaches my leg, but I swiftly tuck my trousers into my socks nevertheless. Eventually it is back on my palm, scampering around my hand before climbing up my arm. It is a disconcerting sensation, but after five minutes it is back in its tube, leaving me with nothing worse than an arm wrapped in the fine silk it continually leaves in its trail. "People have all these strange injuries but often they don't have the culprit," says Mr Bee. Even if it is the spider, the problem is more likely to be an infection getting into the wound rather than the spider venom. Anyone who finds them indoors, says Mr Bee, should trap them using a cup and paper and release them into the garden. They cannot be eradicated entirely, and will return even after a house has been fumigated. "If you leave them alone," he adds, putting the tube back in his pocket, "there is no reason at all why they should attack you." Despite my painless afternoon, I, for one, am happy to take this advice.