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Originally Posted by high plains drifter  Here's a long read to go along with the cool pic but if you're up to it, here goes...
I'm really glad that my wife has begun to develop a genuine appreciation for things like nature, wildlife, plants, etc... and even the creepy crawlies that years ago would have sent her running to the hills in horror. She was never much for the outdoors but since we've been together she's actually developed a desire to learn about nature since it's such a passionate thing to me.
It started with her interest in growing vegetables, herbs, and houseplants. And all of that eventually paved the way towards her [initially reluctant] acceptance of her most feared creatures... bees and spiders.
Took her a long time to even begin to get comfortable with anything with a stinger since she'd been stung by several bees/ wasps as a kid. And while I understand that, I really wanted to educate her about insects and their ultra-important presence in our world. Eventually she got to the point where she no longer feared bees and actually became quite fond of them.
But spiders were a bit more of a challenging sell... even the little fuzzy jumpers were a hard pass for her lol. But what finally brought her around was witnessing one day, a jumping spider ambushing a [very destructive] leaf-hopper insect that had been tearing holes in my wife's most prized hibiscus flowers. She sat hypnotized by this tiny predator helping to rid the flowering plants of pests and so she quickly developed a soft spot for the spiders presence. She's still very cautious and somewhat squeamish around wolf spiders, wasps, etc but she now has some major admiration of insects in general.
And that all brings me to the whole point of this post. We recently discovered a small yellow garden spider that took up residence in one of our flower beds. It was only about an inch in size but very stealth looking. And the more that my wife watched it at a distance, the more mesmerized she became by its behavior... watching it snaring, subduing, and nourishing itself upon whatever insects wound up entrapped in its web. She even caught a glimpse of one of it's molts and became outright impressed with its growth and increasingly striking colors/ appearance. She realized that it ( like most spiders) wanted nothing to do with her and was only there to feed on other insects/ pests.
Anyway... Over the last few weeks this yellow garden spider has REALLY grown and so my wife decided one day to actually feed it. She searched around the garden and eventually found a small grasshopper, caught it, and tossed it into the web. And low and behold, the [now about 3"] spider made a beeline to it, immobilized it, and eventually feasted on a nice helping of innards... smoothie style! At this point, my wife finds all of this very fascinating lol and continues to check in on the spider and feed her whenever she finds something that she thinks the spider might like.
I'm sincerely glad to see someone that once had such fear and indifference of nature, now feeling a genuine connection to it and an understanding of how vitally important many animals are to have around... even the creepy ones.
Oh... almost forgot. Here's the little girl... rapidly growing!
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Funny you should post this pic, I was working in my vegetable garden last weekend, pulling out the cucumber plants as they were done for the season, and went to thin out the basil, and something caught my attention out of the corner of my left eye. I turned to look, and making a web between a tomato plant and the thyme, was this exact species of garden spider. Most of the garden spiders that I've seen over the years have had an orange body with black markings, and what caught my attention here, was the white body with the white legs, and as soon as she saw that I was paying attention to her, she scampered off into the tomato plant. I let her be, finished what I was doing, and left.
By the way, nothing more annoying than walking into a web spanned across a doorway like Brake Weight mentioned, or in my case, the gate going to the driveway
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