Spider spinning her web

Yesterday I spoke about my pet spider, or am I the pet human? A couple of months ago she appeared in the kitchen and as well as building her orb web in the corn of one of the windows, by the frame she spun a cocoon where she laid eggs. Well I could not bring myself to evict this single parent, and her only rent was to catch the odd fly that ventured in. While she would come out on to the web when it was dark, mostly she stayed quite and still for hours on end. Occasionally while doing the washing up or filling the kettle (I save energy by only boiling the water I need), she would rush out to grab a tiny fly that would stumble into her trap. As she is only half an inch long, that's about 12mm, it was not until I trained the camera on her did I realise that she was herself in a little woven shelter too.

I have filmed her a couple of times over the months, and yesterday I filmed the hatched spiderlings. Only the day before they were in their cocoon Today when I looked she was gone. There are still a few of the young spiders there, but it is all over for this nest. At last I can clean the window now.

I had wanted to get the film on to the computer, but I already have over thirty gigabytes of video that I have uploaded out of order, its the pedantic filing system that I have got. Also when I checked I just had no room on the hard drive, so that bit of film will have to wait for now.

However I have another film of a Spider, Lepthyhantes leprosus spinning her web all in glorious close up that I shot a couple of months ago. While on the topic of spiders, following my post about loving the unlovely, a comment was made about getting bitten by spiders. Well in Britain our spiders don't bite nor are they venomous, so while I do encourage folks to respect the diversity of critters, if you do live in a place where creatures can injure you it is best to respect them from a distance.

On the topic of videos, I had an email from You Tube as Friends of the earth had posted another Video and I try to watch there stuff. But in looking around I discovered that I have had my stuff watched nearly four thousand times. Well that's a lot of people I must have bored.