Experts have concluded that the milder winters and year on year, record breaking hot summers in the UK are keeping more of the spiders alive. It used to be only a handful of spiders that would survive the cold weather so the numbers were always kept down. But now they are all surviving the winter and are crawling out of hibernation earlier to mate. The result has been numbers have just rocketed into the hundreds of thousands.
The species - only the female of which bites - had been considered native to Devon and Dorset but has spread as far as East Anglia. Recent reports of bites by BT members are in Canvey Island Essex. The spider usually lives on walls, fences and tree bark.
It may be no bigger than a pea, but its bite can put a grown man in hospital. The "False Black Widow Spider" species, officially called steatoda nobilis, originally came from the Canary and Madeira Islands over a 100 years ago probably in a cargo of bananas. The species had kept a low profile since arriving and it's been established in Devon for a long time but in recent years has been rapidly spreading along the south coast and up the to east of England and is likely to spread northwards in years to come according to insect experts at the Natural History Museum.
http://www.unionsafety.eu/docs/HSNew...gRepeated.html