Found out What this Bug is

So my husband points out some weird, sandy formation around the drain by our water heater and furnace. It's hard and looks like an insect created it. The pictures I took are impossible to see, but they looked like this (but instead were around the drain and the base of the water heater);I poked it with a stick and out came these little black bugs with long wings, and some white larvae bugs. Well, that was it, I sprayed them with bleach, and scrubbed everywhere I could. I kid you not, they were back in 2 days. It was unreal. I made it my morning routine to go downstairs and pour hot bleach water down the drain and around the floor to keep them away.

In the mean time, I scoured the internet. I typed; "mud tunnels", "bug drain water heater", "bug furnace drain", "sand tunnels bug", "exterminator bug basement". I found NOTHING!

Well, the bleach was working, so I figured they were gone. After a month of my morning bleach routine, I decided to stop and see if the bugs would come back now that the weather is warming up and the furnace is no longer running- which means that it is no longer damp by that drain. They didn't come back, so I made the bleach water routine a weekly chore. Simple enough.

Along with warm weather comes children playing outside. My 6-year-old and 3-year-old daughters were playing "hide and go seek". Our yard is the worst place for this game. There is one tree, two bushes, and the grass. Not so challenging. The girls recently figured out that they could crawl into the window well for another hiding spot.

So the other day, I here the 6-year-old yelling that she was hiding in there and can't get out! After I pull her out, I warn her about the spiders and see a humongous one right where she was standing. I grabbed a jar and trapped the black-widow-looking spider. I couldn't see the tell-tale red hourglass on the spider in the jar (which, by the way, is on the under side, not the top side where I was looking- duh!)

About an hour later, BEG started scratching her arm violently. When I looked at it, it was swollen so badly that I knew something had bitten her. Since I didn't think this trapped spider was a black widow spider, I sat down and tried to search for different spiders to determine which black spider this was, which might have been the one that bit her.

It turns out that I stumbled onto a pest site that did not show the spider I had in the jar, but the exact mud things that were in my basement a month ago. You will NOT believe it.