Watering the plants on the front porch the other day, I
turned to see the most beautiful and HUGE black and yellow garden spider in the
midst of her HUGE orb web. She was busily reinforcing the center part of it
with the customary zig-zag lines that make these webs so easy to spot. She was most assuredly a “she” because in the
world of these spiders, the female is easily twice as big as the male. Her body is only a little over an inch but
her leg span is almost 3.5” so she will definitely catch your eye.
Unless you live in the Rockies, you have a good chance of
seeing one of these beauties, for they are fond of making their webs, as their
name suggests, in your garden, or in your bushes probably just a few feet off
the ground.
They belong to the genus of
Orb weavers; think classic spider web with concentric circles, then think of
Charlotte and her clever “writing” in the middle of the web. Ergo many people
call this spider the writing spider. 
The zig-zag lines provide her with a
hiding spot in the center of her web and also helps the birds to see it and
avoid it. Here is your word for the day;
the proper name for those lines is stabilimentum,
perhaps because they also help
stabilize the web. This lovely web may
take hours to build, and yet, each evening, the spider will eat the center
concentric part, which is the sticky part and build it anew. Perhaps that is akin to a fisherman cleaning
his nets. 
I titled this “Behind the scenes” for the morning I found
her she was doing just that, rebuilding the center web. We had just had a windy rainstorm so perhaps
this was an emergency repair, or she simply didn’t get the memo that these
repairs were supposed to take place at night.
I stood there watching as she lifted her abdomen and using that third
claw that these spiders have on every foot, deftly attached the new web strand
to the old one. In the lower part of the
web was a large red paper wasp, trussed lightly in silk for a meal later
on. Being large spiders they can dine
on larger insects, grasshoppers and the like, and some have been said to snare
lizards. Small ones I would presume.
Luckily , we aren’t on their menu, and if for some reason
you did get bit it would be no worse than a bee sting. Nothing deadly. A man once brought us a garden spider in a
peanut butter jar, wrapped with layers of duct tape to keep this “deadly”
spider contained. He thought he had
caught a tarantula! Not likely on the Cape, but then, maybe better safe than
sorry. And as these are great spiders to
have in your garden, we happily gave it a home in ours.
If you are a male spider, with an eye on a female, then
that’s another story. Who knows to what
advantage this is, but for the males, finding that perfect someone is bound to
end in disaster. Plucky little guy will
make his smaller web on a corner of her larger one and then “pluck” at the strings
of her web to get her attention.
However, like the hapless black widow male, or the male praying mantis
that can’t count on any bragging rights, he mates and then dies
immediately. The female, as we all know from
Charlottes Web will also die when the weather turns cold but not until she has
made 3-6, light brown, pear shaped, egg sacs which hold the customary 1,000’s
of little spiderlings.
They may hatch in
the winter, but will stay within the sac waiting for spring when, the coolest
of cool sights, will be to see them all “ballooning “ on the wind, drifting
away from all their hungry siblings!
Sadly, the last few days, when I checked on her, the web was
empty. No prey caught in it, but no spider either. No signs of a struggle. They don’t go on a “walk-about”
but tend to stay on or near the web so I fear something untoward may have
happened to her. So many lizards patrol this same spot that perhaps she has
become part of their energy cycle. It’s
the way of the world. But I will keep an
eye out, and keep you posted, for I would have loved to find those egg sacs
suspended from the nearby bush.
I think I will just feel fortunate to have seen her at all,
and with such a close up of her spinnerets turning out the silk. Let us rejoice always! It surely felt like a peek into the “unseen”
I often ask God for. May your day
include the same, the “unseen” seen.
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