“Charlotte”

 

 

 

            Charlotte has been an out side house pet at Prospect Place for about two months. Charlotte is a female barn spider.

 

Barn spider (noun) -
	1. An orange and tan spider with darkly banded legs that spins an orb web daily "the barn spider was made famous in E. B. White's book 'Charlottes Web'"

 

    She enjoys us catching months, June bugs, and any other bugs that meet her taste and placing them in her web. We enjoy watching her spin and repair her web in the morning, she works very hard and puts in many hours at doing this.

    At first we thought that she was a common house spider and that she was going to have babies but we where wrong Shanon and I spent many hours looking on the internet and in a book that Josh brought to see what kind of spider she was.

    Charlotte has been a joy to watch over the last couple of months.  With fall and winter right around the corner we will miss her when she goes off to hibernate. I guess that we will have to find something else to write about then.

                                                                        Story by Mike  & Shanon

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                            Barn Spider
                                                                                                    (Araneus cavaticus)
                                                                                        (found in the eastern U.S. & Canada)

                                                               A barn spider is an orb-weaving spider. It lives in barns, caves, mine openings and overhanging cliffs.   The barn spider can be found around houses and barns in the northeast part of the United States and Canada. It rebuilds its web every evening and sits at the center of it at night. It usually moves above the web during the day. The barn spider eats insects. When a flying insect gets tangled in the web it rushes to the prey and wraps it up with special silk before biting it. With the insect safely packaged up it can take its time before it starts the meal. The barn spider is a common resident of the Maine countryside, where E. B. White, the author of Charlotte's Web had a farm.