Dairy farmers don't have to worry about suffering poisonous bites from the cows they milk.

Greta Binford, however, has slightly less cooperative subjects. Binford collects venom from the world's most dangerous spiders.

Binford jokes she has "the dream job of most 8-year-old boys. I sit and watch spiders catch bugs."

She specializes in the brown recluse spider and its 100 relatives. Currently, her lab at Lewis & Clark College houses 600 spiders collected in the U.S., Africa, Peru and elsewhere.

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Brown recluse

DNA analysis shows the spiders found in South America hold similarities to spiders found in Africa. By mapping patterns in DNA in spider venom, she hopes to learn more about why certain antidotes work against bites from some spiders but not others. "We're trying to find out why that toxin is so different," says Binford.

One current antidote that works for almost all spiders found in North America does not work on one particular brown spider from Peru, which happens to be found in basements in Los Angeles.

Binford is quick to point out that spider bites are rarely fatal. Particularly poisonous spiders leave behind hard to heal skin wounds.

To analyze venom, she must collect the poison.

That's the tricky part.

She places a spider in a small chamber filled with carbon dioxide. Within a few minutes the spider falls asleep. That's when she places the spider under a microscope on its back and proceeds to wash its fangs with individual drops of water, sucked away with a tiny, needle-sized vacuum.

That vacuum will come in handy in another way in a moment.

Then with a small electrical current she shocks the spider. It's mild and does no damage. But at the moment of the shock, all of the spider's muscles contract causing venom to come out its fangs, and, unfortunately, vomit out of its mouth.

"I have to work very hard to prevent the vomit from contaminating the venom," Binford says, as she vacuums spider vomit with one tube and collects venom with another, all while peering through her microscope.

After a few seconds she's done.

After another few minutes, the spider awakes and seems none the worse for wear.

She sees no lasting side effects on her spiders which she milks regularly over five or six years. "It doesn't seem to shorten their life," she says. "They go ahead, they eat. They mate, have babies."

Binford and her colleagues hope to figure out "what cocktail of anti-venoms will work for bites from spiders from all of the Americas and maybe the world."

More: 'New Yorker' profile of spider woman