How to Get Rid of Spider Webs Around Windows

The fastest way to get rid of spider webs around windows is a dry brush, used before any water touches the glass. Wet webbing turns into a gray smear that spreads across the pane and packs into the frame corners, and from there it takes three times as long to deal with. Dry first, work top down, then wash.

Why late October is when it looks worst

Spiders are not new to your house in the fall. They are finishing. The females that have been building around the windows all summer are at their largest in September and October, and they are tucking egg sacs into sheltered corners before the cold. More webbing gets built in those few weeks than in all of July.

Then the first hard freeze kills the adults and leaves the structure behind. The Twin Cities usually gets that freeze in the second half of October, which is why the webbing looks terrible right when nothing is moving in it anymore. What you brush off in November is mostly abandoned. It lands in the same few weeks as the boxelder bugs and lady beetles piling up on the sunny side of the house, for the same reason: everything outside is looking for a place to spend the winter.

Why windows collect more of it than walls do

Two reasons, and both come down to food and anchor points.

A window with a light behind it is an insect magnet after dark. Moths, midges and mosquitoes come to the glass, and a spider at the edge of that window eats well. Flat siding six feet away offers nothing, so nothing gets built there.

The frame is the other half. A spider needs two surfaces meeting at an angle with a lip to anchor to, and a window offers several: the corners where trim meets siding, the underside of the sill, the gap behind a storm window, the channel at the top of a screen. Soffits are the same deal, sheltered from rain and out of the wind.

Sprinkler fed shrubs or a flower bed right under a window make all of it worse. Damp ground means more insects, and more insects means more webbing above them.

Taking it down without smearing the glass

• Start dry and start high. A soft bristle brush on an extension pole, or a clean broom, or a microfiber duster on a pole. No water yet.
• Get into the corners of the frame, under the lip of the sill, and the top channel of the screen. That is where the dense stuff is, along with the egg sacs.
• Brush the soffit and the top of the trim before you touch the glass, or everything you knock loose lands on work you already did.
• Check the screens. Webbing on mesh brushes off dry and smears badly wet, and fall is when the screens come off anyway.
• Only now wash the glass, with whatever you normally use.

Do not blast webbing off with a hose or a pressure washer. High pressure drives it into the gap between frame and siding, pushes water behind the trim where you cannot see what it is doing, and on a screen it stretches the mesh out of shape. The right tool here costs eight dollars and the wrong one costs a screen.

Wasp and hornet nests under the eaves

By late October a paper wasp nest or a bald faced hornet nest in Minnesota is usually finished. The colony dies with the frost and nobody moves back into an old nest, so an empty gray paper nest under a soffit is just an object at that point. It comes down with a gloved hand or a putty knife.

Do not go by the calendar alone, though. On a sunny fifty degree afternoon in October there can still be live wasps in a nest that looks dead, and they are slow, defensive and unhappy. If you can see any movement at the opening, leave it. Wait for a solid week of hard freezes, or call a pest company. Nobody should be standing on a ladder with one hand full, guessing about whether a nest is active.

Same answer for the small mud tubes under sills. Those are mud daubers, they are not aggressive, and they scrape off once dry.

What comes back, and what you should not pay anybody for

Webbing comes back. Any outfit suggesting otherwise is selling something. A house with lights in the windows and insects in the yard will have webs again by July, and no treatment, coating or service changes that. Taking them down is maintenance, like raking.

So the honest version of this advice is that most of it is not worth hiring out. Brushing webbing off the windows you can reach from the ground is a ten minute job with a broom you already own. Do that part yourself.

The part people call me about is the glass they cannot get to: second story windows over a deck, the tall units above a stairwell, anything on a walkout where the ground falls away. I clean exterior glass with purified water through a pole that reaches up to forty feet, so webbing, screens and glass all get handled from the ground in one pass. Window cleaning starts at $99, backed by the Gleam Guarantee.

If the high windows have gone a season without attention, get a quote or book a visit and I will take a look.