This seems to be an ongoing debate, with very little verifiable data to back up any claims made. According to old wives' tales and other hearsay spiders are repelled from your home if you scatter fresh conkers (horse chestnuts) around the edges of your rooms and on windowsills. There is also a great deal of anecdote among builders and carpenters that sandalwood and cedar function as a spider repellent. The Royal Society of Chemistry even waded into the fray in 2009 offering £300 to anyone who could provide some form of evidence proving or disproving the claims

My real curiosity is: Are there any studies or controlled experiments that have verified this claim? Is there a material or item that can be placed around the home to ensure that spiders feel unwelcome? Is there anyone out there curious enough (or bored enough) to carry out such an experiment?

Having just watched a TV programme called QI 

A question came up 

What came first Spiders or fly's 

Unfortunately they did not answer it.

Anybody? 

It has probably happened to all of us. You are walking down the street and suddenly you feel your face hit into a spiders web. For this to have happened, the spider must have weaved its web right across the whole street, some 6ft above the ground. Does it really do this? If so how? If not, then what explains the web being so high up and horizontal?

i recently read an article in a popular national newspaper claiming that several people have contacted the royal society of chemistry claiming that you can stop spiders entering your house by leaving fairly fresh Horse Chesnuts near doors and on window ledges, as apparently it drives them slightly 'bonkers'. is this true and if so why?

I have a large spider living in my bath at present. He seems to eat moths that fall into the bath and spend a lot of time skulking down the plughole.

I am happy to let him live there if he has everything he needs, or should i be catching him and throwing him in the garden? What is best for the spider? and how long might he live if he does stay?

When I was wandering around my garden one evening I noticed a European honeybee hanging strangely from a lillypilli flower.On closer inspection I saw a well-camouflaged spider holding the bee in place and a number of small flies covering its body (see photo, right).

I can understand the spider's role in all this, but what are the flies doing?

Robert McKinlay, Balgownie, New South Wales, Australia