Got Spiders?

We were sitting on the front porch the other night, when I noticed a spider web on the porch railing that looked like a swarm of gnats caught in the web.

When I looked closer, I found that it was a nest of tiny spiders that must have just hatched out of their egg case.

Just Hatched

I usually just deport spiders if I find them inside the house.  I leave most spiders alone if they are outdoors; they eat other bugs and anything that will take out Black Flies is pretty much fine with me.  Black Flies are small, biting flies that love me for some reason and I do not like the way they fly into my ears.

However, two exceptions to this Spider Tolerance Policy are Black Widow Spiders and Brown Widow Spiders.  The Brown Widows in particular seem to love our front porch, building their messy webs all over the railings around the porch and all over the porch furniture, the porch light and pretty much anything else they can use to anchor their webs.  Their egg sacs are white spheres covered with spiky protrusions; there was an empty sac and another full one just next to where these tiny spiders were, so we knew that's what they were.

We joke that we contract out our Halloween decorations to the spiders because they use locally sourced, organic webbing, but there were just too many of these Brown Widows, so that was the last of them.

We'll leave the decorating to the Orb Weavers, one of whom seems to have designs on entrapping our car.

More on local spiders:  http://waynesword.palomar.edu/redmite.htm

Codependent to Caterpillars, Part II

Butterfly Garden

We love our front-yard butterfly garden, especially when we see several Monarch butterflies at once enjoying the flowers and bushes we've put there to attract them.

In fact, we've had lots of Monarchs this summer flying around and landing on the Asclepia, the lavenders and the Buddleia.

What we haven't had is what makes butterflies:  namely, caterpillars.  The Asclepia plants were flourishing, but with all those Monarchs fluttering around, they should have been all but stripped of leaves.  But they weren't.

After the disaster of the Anise Swallowtail caterpillars we found on the parsley in the back yard, probably gobbled up by the Scrub Jays that hang around our bird feeder, we relocated some several Monarch caterpillars from an Asclepia plant in the back yard.  When they, too, disappeared, we began to think that maybe it wasn't just the Scrub Jays eating our caterpillars.

Wasps, lizards, ants and other predators eat caterpillars and we now suspect that the Mud Dauber Wasps that have built nests all over the eaves of our house may be responsible for the disappearance of the Monarch caterpillars.  (Caution:  that article is fairly graphic--don't read it if you're squeamish--it's like something out of "Alien").

The good news about these wasps is that they prefer to use spiders, especially Black Widows, to feed their larvae; the bad news is that they will also use butterfly caterpillars.  That's O.K. with us if the caterpillars are the larvae of the Tomato Hornworm, laid by the Sphinx Moth, but not O.K. if it's our Monarch caterpillars.

So, to protect at least some of the Monarch caterpillars, we finally bought a butterfly cage, a soft-sided mesh cage to protect them.  The cage has a clear plastic side and three mesh sides, one of which has a zipper to form a door on that side so you can open the cage.

Last Tuesday we put two fairly large Monarch caterpillars into it with some of the Asclepia in a bud vase with water.  Cindy wound plastic wrap around the stems of the plants so the caterpillars wouldn't crawl in and drown, which was probably a good precaution:  I don't think they can swim.  Then the next day we found two more caterpillars and moved them in, using a rose bud vial with a rubber lid.  We put stones in the bottom to keep the whole thing from blowing over in the wind.

By Friday the first caterpillar had crawled off the plants and attached to the cage to form a chrysalis.  Naturally, since nothing is ever easy, Numero Uno decided to attach and form his chrysalis very close to the zipper, which made it very difficult to open the cage to put fresh plants for caterpillars Two and Three.  Number four was very small and we never found out what happened to him, but Two and Three were eating everything in sight, so we had to slide the fresh plants in very carefully.

So that's the story so far.  Today Number Two is crawling all over the cage, looking for a suitable place to attach (NOT near the zipper, PLEASE!), and Number Three is still eating everything is sight and will probably attach soon, too.