a beautiful spider for Blogtober Day 11

For years I was a fully signed up arachnophobe, which was terrible given how much I loved slugs, snails, beetles, birds, plants, trees…you get the drift. I used to have to clip the spider pages of my field guides together so I didn’t accidentally open them and see a photo, and autumn was a very difficult time of year with all the house spiders coming in to find a mate, and generally being a lot more active. Coupled with all the Halloween spooky stuff, it was definitely problematic as they say.

I lived in a farm cottage for about 15 years and the 8-legged visitors we used to have were enormous and terrifying, but shortly after I moved in, I started beekeeping. House spiders absolutely love a beehive as it’s warm and there is plenty of food: they don’t eat the bees but they do polish off all the wax moths that can be a real problem for honey bees so it’s good to let them stay. Being covered top-to-toe in sting-proof mesh and wearing leather gloves meant I felt invincible when faced with both 40,000 bees and any other occupants, such as whopping great female Tegenaria. Getting used to gently marshalling the spiders off the bee boxes and roofs allowed me to gradually overcome my fear. I still can’t pick them up, and they really make me jump when they skedaddle across the carpet, but I can just watch them now, and if I really need them out of the house, I use the cup-and-cardboard technique to relocate them.

My son had a nasty shock when he was staying here a few months ago, and found one in his towel as he was wrapping himself up after a shower. The spider vanished, and Tristan was a bit concerned that it would leap out again at some point, but we found said spider the following morning…having been on the receiving end of my cat’s attention, so the poor spider wasn’t going to do any more leaping. It was a rare and touching moment of bonding between my cat and my son however, so I can be thankful that the spider did not die in vain.

I found this amazing garden spider in the wildflower verge that we planted outside our house. The vegetation has all died back but there are so many webs at the moment, I can’t bring myself to cut it back. Sometimes she’s on a web which spans about 3 feet, and other times she is brilliantly camouflaged on a wild carrot seedhead:

Here is my painting of her: