I caught these two fooling around on the milkweed, naturally.
I also collected 3 Parasteatoda egg sacs nearby, so it’s not just the beetles getting in the mood.
In my state of limited mobility, the best I can do is roam around my yard looking for spiders. I’m not seeing any, other than a few Parasteatoda in the garage and compost, despite the fact that we’ve got lots of flowers, and it’s mid-July, and you’d think they ought to be thriving. We don’t even have any grass spiders!
What we do have is clouds of flies. Just hovering swarms of little bitty flies hovering around everything.
Come to my yard, spiders! There is a feast awaiting you!
It happened to be right there as I walked into the house. It’s too hot to go looking for them.
Could it be…a Monarch?
I was sitting at my computer this morning, when a fuzzy, tiny blob slowly lowered itself before my face. I looked closely at it, and it was a single strand of spider silk with a dead mosquito at the end of it. I tried to take a photo with my phone, but it was too small and close. Here it is, anyway.
Now it’s possible that some ceiling spider was fishing for humans, but I prefer to think that it was a spider cult offering a sacrifice to their god. I couldn’t hear what they were chanting, so I don’t know if they were praying for anything, and I prefer to think they were just expressing their gratitude.
Steatoda borealis, the boreal combfoot! They’re coming back!
I was getting worried…I’ve reliably had a thriving population of these false widows in our compost bin. They disappear every winter, unsurprisingly, and then come back in the spring, plump and fully grown. They were late this year, I think because my wife shoveled out most of the compost for her garden (the nerve! That’s now what the bin is for, it’s for fostering a colony of spiders!), but they’re in resurgence now.
Get out there and celebrate bees! I’d like to. I tried. But right now we’re drowning in near constant rain and drizzle and cool temperatures, so all our bees are hiding. We’ve planted lots of bee-friendly flowers in our yard, but they haven’t blossomed yet.
I guess I’ll have to settle for this poor photo I took last year.
My excuse is that I’m usually looking for spiders, and it’s pure chance that I might click the shutter when a bee wanders by. Still, I appreciate them, especially since they can be a good source of spider food.
Oh no. They’re not as interesting as spiders.
Downy Woodpecker
Maybe I need to tell Mary to take more photos of birds.
I told you I was running away from home this afternoon! I was walking for 2 or 3 hours, and now my quads are killing me–I’ve been sedentary for too long. I didn’t have much luck finding any interesting spiders, but the bushes are alive with spider food, swarms of gnats and midges, and if you feed them they will come.
As soon as I got home, of course, I find a spider on my garage door. It’s a very small Attulus fasciger, and it has been hunting successfully. That’s a midge of some sort, totally wrecked in the spiders jaws.
Asiatic Wall Jumping Spider
More will be coming. It is that time of year. Hooray!
I haven’t shown off my tarantula, Blue, in a while. They’re doing well, having a hearty breakfast.
Getting bigger, too.
