WordPress causing Apache to go haywire

I have a couple very very low volume wordpress blogs, and it appears as though on a regular basis (every day or two) the random accessing of the sites urls via bots/spammers is causing apache/php to go haywire forking processes all over and consuming memory. I currently have a watchdog (monit) which will restart apache when this starts to happen, but there must be something wrong that I can fix.

This is a Gentoo VPS host (Slicehost)
Kernel: linux 2.6.24-19-xen
Apache: 2.2.11
PHP: 5.2.9-pl2-gentoo
Wordpress: 2.7.1

I’d be happy to post applicable logs and such as well, but i didn’t want to blast useless information as the logs I’ve seen just look like normal page requests, albeit faster then a normal human browser and with spoofed IPs and User Agents.