When the mere maiden Arachne bested Athena in a Grecian weaving contest, she paid a terrible price. Athena was a goddess, after all, and those types don’t like being humbled. Unequipped with Star Wars wisdom (letting the Wookie win so that your arm remains in its socket), Arachne forged on and boldly won the day.  Later she suffered a severe Wookie thrashing and her pleasing features were mangled for life by Athena.  Although the other gods living on Deity Blvd. eventually took pity on her, they waited until she died to honor her with the role of weaver goddess.

  In the modern world, we know all hideous faced weavers as followers of Arachne and call them Arachnids: the spiders.  Never mind the fact that spiders have been on the earth for millions of years before there even was a Greece or an Arachne,  they inspire us to spin tales as fast as they spin their webs.  Consider the Banded Garden Spider, that spider of the season that produces those stunning orb webs along the field path.  Here is a large spider that elicits wonder even in those who normally get sweaty and make infantile noises around such beasts.

  I won’t shower you with photos this time.  Just take a look here and you’ll see the arachnid to which I refer.  She is a beautiful thing perched upside-down upon her carefully crafted website. This one just completed the process of turning a newly caught grasshopper into a burrito by wrapping it within a silk blanket and was about to deliver the coup de grace when I bumbled upon her.  She shyly abandoned her catch and dropped to the lower section of web in order to hide her face, but soon regained confidence and returned to her meal. 

  The Banded Garden Spider is a member of a select group of orb weavers known as the Argiopes.  They are the best of the best in a weaver’s world. Though their structures are only meant to ensnare insect prey, their simplicity of design seems divine (sorry Athena, but its true).  The radiating spoke of the web is made with non-sticky threads and the spiraling portion with sticky fibers of high performance liquid protein.  The center of the wheel is reserved for the huntress to await her prey.  She remains in contact with every spoke and instantly detects if an insect gets ensnared. You’ll see that her legs are held out in the fashion of a St. Andrew’s cross and paired in sets of two.  Our garden spider, though possessed with eight eyes, has poor vision so she relies strictly on touch.

  Often Argiopes create elaborate zigzag patterns down the center of their web as a finishing touch. This trait has earned them the name of “writing spiders,” even though their penmanship skills are limited to repetitious Z’s and W’s.  The real reason behind this behavior is believed to be the equivalent of us putting stickers on our porch windows to keep birds from crashing into them.  If a bird should blinder through one of these webs it is both destroyed and eliminated.  Argiopes eat their old silk in order to recycle the proteins into new silk. The loss of a web creates an additional workload, so the Z’s spell “Yield.”

  I came across one odd superstition about this web writing thing.  It is considered bad luck to mention the name of a loved one while standing next to an orb web.  The spider will hear it and incorporate it into its next web. This is apparently a bad thing.  Obviously, these folks have not read Charlotte’s Web (“Some Pig”).

  The web supporting the female in our picture had no such writing on it, so I could concentrate instead on her lovely features alone.  Her plump abdomen was delicately banded with black, white, and yellow striations – thus her common name.  The head shield area on the back of the beastess, was creamy white with a silvery hue – thus the reason for the Argiope name.  You see, Argiope was another one of those immortal Grecian entities.  She was a Naiad Nymph who lived on the slope of Mount Parnassos in Phokis. Her name is translated as “of the silver face” since she lived in a silvery mountain stream.

  Nymphs, like Argiope, were divine nurses of the young and protectors of girls and maidens. Arachne could have used one of these!  They saw it as their duty to insure that their charges safely navigated the perils of youth and attained adulthood.  Perhaps here is the best correlation between the water nymphs and the water-phobic spiders.  The life of an Argiope spider female is dedicated to getting her next generation through the perils of winter.

  The males certainly play a role in this game, but they are less than one third the size of the females and are rarely seen. By the end of summer, the females will construct a tough papery egg sac, shaped like a kettledrum, and place it along the edge of the web.  Just like Charlotte, she then dies.

  Safe inside the package she has provided them, hundreds of her yellow eggs – looking for all the world like tiny egg yolks sitting in cupcake holders – will remain safe until the following spring.  Most of them hatch before winter’s blast, but all remain inside until the proper time.

  The autumn Argiope is a lady on her last legs, but one nearing completion of a divine task.