Folk-lore about spiders suggests that one way to keep them from the house is to leave conkers around the place. Some swear by it, others refute it. Nobody really seems to know, although you can buy chestnut-based anti-spider spray on Amazon, so somebody thinks it works enough to shell out £6.53 for it!

Last year the Royal Society of Chemistry had a cunning idea to promote its new website for chemists called ChemSpider, described enticingly as "a free access service providing a structure centric community for chemists". Lord knows that could do with some promotion, so RSC chose to invite the public to test the hypothesis that conkers repel spiders, and win £300 for their trouble. This wheeze caught the media's attention spectacularly - entirely eclipsing poor old ChemSpider but nonetheless getting a good bit of attention for RSC and scientific methodology.

Well, now they've announced the results. RSC spokesman Jon Edwards said Year 5 and 6 pupils at independent Roselyon School, in Par, Cornwall had finally disproved the age-old theory that conkers can keep spiders out of the house.

He said: "When we consulted a spider expert at the Natural History Museum he was highly sceptical about the spider theory. We even tried it ourselves but couldn't reach a scientific conclusion. The Roselyon entry stood out from the crowd because of the balanced, scientific methods and well designed experiments. They should be proud of their fair mindedness, scientific rigour and logical thinking."

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I don't know if the above-mentioned expert was Ranger's Blog reader Stuart Hine, but it probably was. Anyway, whoever it was was clearly right to be sceptical, or so the children's work suggests. Here's an entertaining video of the experiments undertaken by the school. They certainly demonstrate some imaginative and very effective teaching of science.

One can see how the experiments came to the conclusion they did, and it looks as though the experimenters enjoyed themselves! RSC staff themselves also had a go - as mentioned above - in a slightly more sedate manner:

This one was inconclusive. In fact, in my view, all the experiments were inconclusive, light-hearted though they may have been. This is because they were testing for the wrong thing, and sometimes with the wrong spiders. In the Roselyon school video the spiders seemed to be of various sorts - and although the video wasn't pin-sharp only one appeared to be the classic Tegenaria sp. which is the type of 'big hairy spider' that inhabitants of houses traditionally hope to repel. One other, and indeed all the spiders tested in the RSC video were big web-weavers (Araneus) which would never voluntarily come indoors and are pretty much useless off their webs anyway.

The real problem was the scenario used in all the experiments. In effect the spiders were being tested on their response to a possible frightening stimulus, or a dangerous situation. These were not situations that spiders coming into a house would be faced with. If the house was as bright, noisy and full of hazards as the Roselyon school classroom laboratory, I suspect most if not all spiders would be well enough repelled anyway whether or not conkers were present. The spiders we saw in that video were keen to run and hide pretty much anywhere, which perhaps was no surprise.

A more enlightening, but far less entertaining to watch, experiment, would be to assess the numbers of spiders which entered a set area voluntarily, as opposed to how many fled out of it. This would by necessity take much longer and need to be done in less conspicuous circumstances: perhaps a video camera set to detect motion over a few nights would do the trick - one night watching over stones, the next, conkers. Or maybe spider 'nest boxes' with conkers or without, hidden around the place to see if they enter or not. Various other improvements in experimental design could doubtless suggest themselves.

Anyway, I don't want to go all bah-humbug on the experiment, or the RSC. Jolly well done to all of them for a bit of fun. But for me, the jury is still out on the spider-conker question. I don't have £300 to offer, but I'm still keen to find out. Autumn seems to be the time for it, judging by the seasonal enquiries, so get your thinking-caps on. Who will take up the challenge?