Yellow Sac Spider Facts & Information

What You Can Do

Yellow sac spider prevention is best accomplished by sealing holes, cracks, and gaps in the home's doors, windows, and foundation that enable the spiders to enter the home. Removing inside clutter that serves as harborage for spiders is also helpful.

What Orkin Does

Your local Orkin Pro is trained to help manage yellow sac spiders and similar pests. Since every building or home is different, your Orkin Pro will design a unique spider treatment program for your situation.

Orkin can provide the right solution to keep yellow sac spiders in their place…out of your home, or business.

Appearance

• Body: The top part of its abdomen includes a dark, lance-shaped mark that runs down the middle of the abdomen from the point where the thorax and abdomen meet to about the mid-point of the abdomen.

• Color: It has a pale beige to yellow color and often has a tinge of green. Its chelicerae (fangs), and the tips of their legs are dark brown. This leg coloration gives these spiders the appearance of having dark colored feet.

• Size: The yellow sac spider is a small spider with a body length of about 1/4 inch for both males and females.

Diet

Yellow sac spiders usually feed on other spiders, plus agricultural and garden pest insects and their eggs. If food sources are limited, these spiders become cannibalistic and may consume their own eggs.

Habitat

Yellow sac spiders are usually most active at night, and during the day will retreat to their web masses (sacs) for protection against predators. Outdoors, these spiders normally are found hiding in rolled up leaves or in other debris in small, hidden locations. In addition to protection, these daytime hiding places also function as molting sites (shedding of their outer "skin" in order to grow larger), mating, egg laying, and hibernating sites. Their preferred habitats around the home are in:

• Bushes

• Gardens

• Leaf piles

• Trees

• Woodpiles

Geographic Range

Yellow sac spiders are found throughout most all of the United States, but are fewer in number within the northern, colder climates.

Reproduction

Male yellow sac spiders will hunt for females and breed with them in the early summer. Females typically mate only once but produce as many as five egg sacs, each of which contains approximately 40 eggs. Their egg sac serves to protect not only the mature spiders, but also to protect the eggs and immature stages of the yellow sac spider.