Weave been living in the flames, Weave been eating up our brains

Last night at the Old Entomologist was the first trial of the new host-responsibility spider-web-blood-test policy. Another Kiwi was rushed off his feet all evening, injecting blood samples to flies and feeding them to the spiders. Head barmaid Evangeline Van Holsteren reckons we are loonies, but I reckon that if web analysis proves to be a viable way of testing which patrons are already too pissy-eyed to serve, then we can sell the idea to American states who want to tell whether people have been taking the certain substances before disbursing unemployment insurance for which they have already paid the premiums.

Results so far have been equivocal.
Perhaps it was a mistake to pre-treat the spiders with the Evolvamat:

The globe had grown enormous. It was flushed with unclean ruby, like a vampire moon. From it, there issued palpable ropes and filaments, pearly, shuddering into strange colors, that appeared to fasten themselves to the ruined floor and walls and roof, like the weaving of a spider. Thickly and more thickly they multiplied, forming a curtain between Grotara and the chasm, and falling upon Thirlain Ludoch and himself, till he saw the sanguine burning of the globe as through arabesques of baleful opal.

Then there was the fractal web that combined the features of a Julia set and the Sierpiński gasket, and displayed certain signs of quantum computation along the strands. I think that one was from a spider exposed to Greenish Hue's delicately-poised blood chemistry. But as Keats remarked to Chapman at the end of his first, catastrophic attempt to master the principles of golf, these are merely tee-thing troubles.

Here is Charles Harness in 1968, riffing on spider-web / drugs-test research:

A spider dosed with a little alcohol weaves a drunken web. If stimulated with caffeine, she will build one which is a model of engineering precision. With mushroom drugs, she builds one circular strand with a couple of spokes, then hangs in the centre, a spider god in a spider universe.

This was between Witt's original experiments in 1948 and the 1980s revival, and before the research entered popular consciousness (for values of "popular consciousness" that include "featuring in a Time/Life book").* Have any other science fiction novels used "abnormal webs from spiders affected by drugged human blood" as a plot device? AFAF.

We have not spoken of the aberrant webs such as are woven by spiders after you blast them with fly-spray. As noted in recent scientifical developments, "Insecticides don't work particularly well on spiders". Afterwards they wake up in the morning with a heinous hangover, but they have developed a taste for the stuff, and the next thing you know they are knocking at the door pleading for just another spray, just one, and then they promise to give it up.

There are several reasons why spiders are resistant to insecticide, not only that they are not insects, but also they have kindle-lungs [obliged to call them that due to a sponsorship deal] that oxygenate their creepy green spider blood hemolymph and then the muscles indirectly (rather than supplying oxygen directly to muscles through tracheae), so dilution and EXPLAINING VOICE

From the same informative article:

Another piece of advice is to cut down the bushes and trees near your house.

This advice is especially sage in the case of ash-trees.:

Oh look, the scary bit is now available on the Youtuba! Whoo-hoo, Jennifer will be so helped!

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* UPDATE. I forgot to mention the circumstance that first inspired Dr Witt to get spiders wired on amphetamines:

In 1948 a German zoologist H.M. Peters was studying spiders and faced a problem. The Spiders weaved their nests between 2AM and 5AM in the morning. He questioned a friend Dr. Peter Witt, a German born Swiss pharmacologist, what they could do to get the spiders to weave webs during feasible day times.

All that heavy-construction web-weaving was making TOO MUCH FECKIN' NOISE and keeping Peters awake.