Tag Archives: Spiders

Spiderlings

We love Mother Nature out at the cabin we are building but this story may freak out some readers.  Honestly, it gave me quite a start as well.  As you know, dear friends, we are building this cabin from scratch.  Emily and I are doing the work ourselves so we get into a little bit of everything.  Plumbing has long been on the list but we had to get the bathroom floor finished and the stem wall built and a hundred other things.   I promise there is a plan to our madness, even if the plan itself is mad.

Wolf spider on her egg sac
Wolf spider on her egg sac

Anyhow, hooking up the bootwasher was pretty high priority for obvious reasons.  I took a day off of work to be on the job.  We loaded up a bunch of pvc pipe up and I headed off to the site.  I measured and cut and fitted and glued.  I then cussed and cut all of that pipe down and cussed some more when it almost fit.  If you know about pvc pipe, you know that it is rigid.  There may be some play in a plumbing system but generally there is not a lot.  When things work, that is a good thing as you don’t want pipes full of…stuff…moving.  So I almost had things hooked together but something just didn’t meet up like I had planned.  I had to cut it all back out (because pvc glue sets fast and does not forgive) and do a bunch of it over..to the tune of $45 wasted.

Wolf spider on her egg sac
Fearless!

So, I was aggravated but that’s just construction it seems.  I flopped back down on my back and wiggled up under the bathroom floor in the underneath of the house.  As I was about to begin work again, I turned my head and not a foot away was a gigantic spider sitting atop a bag of baby spiders.

Wolf spider - spiderlings
Wolf spider – spiderlings

Spiders don’t freak me out but I have to tell you, I sort of startled a little bit.  It’s just weird when something you don’t expect presents itself…and I think people are sort of programmed to be wary of spiders anyhow.  Anyhow, I let her be as she was just preparing to raise a family of spiderlings (yeah, that’s the technical term), apparently without a father figure around.  Who am I to try to mess with a mother doing her best.  I finished the plumbing and was on my way.

A few days later, I was back by and the spiderlings had hatched.  There were literally hundreds of itsy bitsy spiders on a web that Momma spider had spun very close to our initial encounter.  I couldn’t get a decent picture as they were tiny, but to the eye, it was quite a sight!  I don’t know what the survival rate is, but I may have hundreds of wolf spiders under my new place eating other critters that aren’t welcome!