These grapes come with potential bite

MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL STAR TRIBUNE
MINNEAPOLIS -- Without giving it much thought, Dottie Brown popped a couple of red seedless grapes into her mouth as she cleaned the bunch she had bought the night before.
"If that thing had come crawling out then," she said, "oh, it would have been more than a shriek."
As it turned out, when Brown returned to the kitchen of her home a few hours later, she did indeed let loose with what she called "a very short shriek" -- her immediate response to "that thing": a black widow spider crawling out of the sink after apparently coming home with the grapes.
"I don't like being around spiders," she said.
That eight-legged surprise put Brown in the very startled -- however small -- group of grocery customers and employees who have encountered black widow spiders in produce, primarily grapes, said Kevin Elfering, dairy and food inspection director for the state's Health Department.
In Elfering's 27 years in the department, he said he has heard of such cases roughly a dozen times, none causing any reported harm.
"It can inflict a painful bite," and its venom attacks the nervous system, only rarely proving fatal, said Jeff Hahn, an entomologist with the University of Minnesota Extension Service. He confirmed that the spider was in fact a black widow after viewing a picture of it.