Along Came a Spider

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The HUGE black and yellow garden spider (Argiope Aurantia), who lived in the corner of my upstairs eve, passed on.  She was a wonderful spider (although very scary to look upon).  She at moths, aphids, flies and grasshoppers, mosquitoes, sometimes bees and I saw several wasps.   (Do NOT try to touch this spider….they will bite!)

As a little side note: male and female black and yellow garden spiders spin their own webs and hunt on their own during the day for most of their lives. Once mature, the males leave his web to hunt for a mate –I never met him, but I’m sure he must have been just wonderful.  My spider was a beauty and she had very selective tastes.

Anyway, of course the poor fellow passed on, the job was just way too much for him.

I never named my spider, but she created a huge, large, GIANT web with heavy zigzagging, called ‘stabiliments’ down the center.

Our winter was just too cold for her (I am told in the milder areas of the United States my spider’s relatives can live for years.) and she passed.  I saw her poor crumbled body on the roof shingle below her tattered web one day.

I left her eggs to spend the winter in their very dormant state inside their multilayered egg sac.  They emerged Sunday…within thirty minutes what once was an spider incubator…was just a blank wall.

Close to where they had incubated an couple of darling barn swallows have taken up residents.  More on that later.

Linda

20 thoughts on “Along Came a Spider”

  1. Our spiders seems to do fine year-round because it doesn’t get that cold here. My garden favorites are praying mantis and carpenter bees. They’re both the sort that come right up to see what we’re doing. The bees are big and black and very nosy. I know they can be destructive if they start chewing on your house, but we have lots of better wood around here for them. After the bugs, the lizards and garter snakes are my gardening buddies. The snakes just came out a couple of weeks ago, but I haven’t seen my haypile buddy yet. We put out a bale or two at a time to feed the horses and it lived under them, keeping the mice under control. On a cold morning it would be under the tarp keeping warm. It got so tame that it wouldn’t even flee when I moved the tarp, it would just wait patiently until I fed the horses and pulled the tarp back over it. Thank you for your post this morning, it reminded me how much I love even the littlest guys around here. Well, except for the piss-ants. I don’t like when they’re on my kitchen counter.

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  2. Oh dear .. do you think they were gobbled up? my mother had a spider called elizabeth but i am sure i have told you that before.. I had no idea that a spider could live for years, but I guess I just never really thought about it .. hope you are having a good productive day with lots of time for a cup of tea on the step!

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  3. Hi There, I’m trying to catch up after being gone for a week.

    Hope you all have had a good week… I always enjoy reading about your adventures –this week, especially with the water. Interesting!

    Spiders make me chill. Guess I have too much city girl in me!!!!!! ha ha …. Even the tiny ones are not my friends… You did have a ‘pretty’ one living near you thought, didn’t you? Sorry he died.

    Have a great day, Linda.
    Hugs,
    Betsy

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  4. You are much more generous than I. I saw two of those last year and just about came unglued both times! We also have ground spiders that give me a scare periodically. They are the fuzzy kind and live in holes…in my garden, of course.

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  8. Lovely post. I have spent many hours educating my children and other people’s children on the value of spiders. They have such undeserved reputations.

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  10. I loved these spiders when we were in Texas because they kept insects out of the old farmhouse we were living in. They are really beautiful. I had no idea they bite if disturbed! 🙂 I bet your son’t new-old house is going to be wonderful, by the way!

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  11. Heh heh. Someone who appreciates spiders and all they do to help cut down on the insect pest population. Thanks for the educational info on those eight-legged beauties. Hope a few of her babies set up housekeeping in places where they can do some good.

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  13. I think spiders do many valuable things around your house. They certainly kill a lot of bugs for you. A good description of a critter’s life cycle.

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  15. I LOVE you post about spiders!! I have been known to pick them up on a newspaper in my house and take them outside to the hedge!! I’ve had garden spiders. One that was in the corner of our backyard fence, took her web down when she left. One built a web near the motion light on the back patio. She could make the light come on!!

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  16. We used to have your spider’s cousin in SC. They were called banana spiders. They also put the zig-zagging in their webs, which was a good thing because there was nothing I hated more than walking through a spider web. Luckily with zig-zagging usually alerted me!
    I guess I’ll have to wait to learn if the babies made it to safety!

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