Should You Remove Yellow Garden Spiders Once You've Identified Them?

Few North and Central American spiders are more eye-catching that the yellow garden spider (Argiope aurantia). Yellow garden spiders are a type of orb-weaving spider, constructing huge, circular webs to suspend themselves between branches, shrubs, or your patio posts. Walking into a yellow garden spider's web is a feeling that can send shivers down anyone's spine. 

You might worry, are yellow garden spiders poisonous to you or your pets? Should you remove them from your yard — or even kill them? It's understandable if you're a little frightened by these big arachnids and their strong webs. After all, they can look very similar to banana spiders, the venomous pest you don't want to find lurking in your yard. However, yellow garden spiders are non-aggressive and harmless to humans, and they'd much rather avoid you than launch an attack. 

According to legend, the yellow garden spider will write out the names of people who disturb its web, forecasting a bad fate for them in the near future. In reality, you're not likely to suffer any cosmic curse by moving the spider, but leaving it alone could bring good fortune to your garden in other ways. Here's what you should do if you find a yellow garden spider outside your home and why you should consider letting this Charlotte keep her web.

Yellow garden spiders are venomous, but this spider isn't equipped to cause any serious harm to humans. Firstly, yellow garden spiders have relatively poor eyesight and mostly rely on vibrations to navigate their webs. If it feels continuously threatened, the spider may shake its web back and forth or drop to the ground, natural defense mechanisms it uses to intimidate or hide from predators. 

Yellow garden spiders can bite as a last resort in self-defense, but their bite feels about like a bee sting and may be concerning only for those with weakened immune systems or allergic reactions. These patient hunters would much rather use their venom to paralyze prey, and they can protect your garden from destructive and annoying pests, like grasshoppers, wasps, mosquitoes, and even aphids.

In other words, there's no need to remove yellow garden spiders from your yard. If the spider has taken up residence in an inconvenient spot, such as your front doorway or walkway, you can use a long stick, broom handle, or similar implement to gently gather up the web and relocate it. Yellow garden spiders are a good sign of a balanced ecosystem, but if you'd prefer to keep these creepy crawlies far, far away from your home, you may want to avoid growing plants that are attracting spiders to your yard, such as tall shrubs, corn plants, and sunflowers.