What you see: A white wispy thing around your apple stem.
What it is: Insect webbing.
Eat or toss: Wipe it off and get on with your apple-eating plans.
Why do some apples have white wisps around the stems?
As large, bipedal creatures, we humans may barely notice the little dip around an apple stem. But for a tiny spider? It’s like a little hotel. All they need to do is spin a little sleeping bag (which is probably what you see here) and they have a cozy, somewhat protected retreat. Plus, our eight-legged friends can find a buffet of local insects not far from their beds.
“Spiders love to hang out in the stem end of the fruit,” Anna Wallis, fruit coordinator for New York State’s Integrated Pest Management Program wrote to me in an email. “They’re protected there and have access to lots of other insects in the canopy to feed on.”
Matt Bertone, director of the Plant Disease and Insect Clinic at North Carolina State University, noted that the spiders that enjoy apple nooks are “mobile hunting spiders.” As in, they don’t catch their prey in webs, but rather proactively hunt. Such spiders can be helpful colleagues for orchard managers.
“They often hide away near where they are patrolling, and spiders provide great pest control,” Bertone, an entomologist, explained.
In any case, Bertone said he wouldn’t have any safety concerns with eating an apple whose stem nook formerly housed a spider.
He suggested just quickly wiping off the webbing and moving on with your plans for the apple. “Even if the silk is consumed,” he wrote in an email, “it would pose no health threat.”
Do all white wisps around apple stems come from spiders?
Bertone said caterpillars or mites might also leave behind some webbing. But the combination of how tiny the space is and the absence of damage to the apple tissue suggest a spider silk is a likely explanation in the images featured here.
And in addition to spinning themselves a cozy space to get some shut-eye, spiders might also encase their eggs in a ball of fluff attached to an apple stem. In that case, the baby spiders could easily be long gone by the time you bite into the apple. But just in case they’re not, Bertone noted, “Baby spiders are harmless.”
And, he further explained, any spider tiny enough to inhabit the dip at the top of an apple, would not be a spider capable of posing a threat to people. He wrote: “Most spiders have venom, but few are dangerous to humans, if they even want to or can deliver the venom. At this size the spider would not have been dangerous.”
SOURCES:
- Matt Bertone, PhD. Entomologist. Director, Plant Disease and Insect Clinic. North Carolina State University. Email correspondence. Spring 2025.
- Anna Wallis. Fruit Integrated Pest Management Coordinator for New York State Integrated Pest Management (Cornell AgriTech. Cornell University). Email correspondence. 2025.
