Little Miss Muffet better not sit on THAT tuffet!

This morning, while leaving for work, I opened my front door to the front screened entrance. And I-- being afraid of spiders in general, but especially big, fast ones like wolf spiders-- made my usual visual inspection to determine whether there were any wolf spiders that were about to surprise me. Instead I spotted this:

This spider had a caterpillar, and the caterpillar was still alive and wiggling. I got some video footage of it. Sorry about the shaking at the end. I tried to zoom out, and then found it was fuzzy and couldn't get it to focus again.

I felt bad for the caterpillar, but that is nature. The spider must eat.

After awhile the spider moved off of the caterpillar and hung to the side. I got some pics of it.

Do you see what I see?

Isn't that a red hourglass on it's belly? I do believe that is a Brown Widow. However she was quite large. I would say she was about an inch in diameter. I finally decided that she had to go, as she was right by my screen door I have to go in and out of everyday. I avoid killing whenever possible, so I swept her outside.

However I also got a shot of this guy, too. This one has been hanging out on the ledge for a couple of weeks.

Then while looking back through my photos, I realized...

...this is another widow! I don't know how well you can tell in these little photos, but when you see the full res photos you can clearly see the reddish hourglass.

The last couple of weeks, I've noticed this wispy and messy webbing taking over around my place.

Now I know what is making this. I have a widow infestation, and they are building these webs around in my screened areas. There's more around my bird's cage. Hopefully THAT won't become a problem.

After looking up info about brown widows, I saw a pic of their egg sacs, and a light bulb went off. Wait a minute. Is that what I saw around my garage door the other day? So when I got home today, I got some pics around the garage door.



I don't know about you, but I think those are brown widow egg sacs. At least a dozen of them around my garage door. 80 eggs per sac. That's a lotta widows!