Rewilding My Lot

Readers from last year may remember that a large Yellow Garden Spider (Argiope aurantia) built an impressive web above the garage door in the fall season of 2024.

In mid-September she created an egg sac and hung it in a corner of her web. I relocated the egg sac to a nearby oak tree.

Two weeks later she made another egg sac, which I also moved to the oak tree near the first one. Soon after that, she died.

So then there were two Yellow Garden Spider egg sacs attached to an oak tree using whatever sticky web strands I could transfer from the original web.

Given the time of year, it was likely that the spiderlings wouldn’t hatch until spring and so I just left the sacs on the tree. Amazingly, they held in place through the whole winter, and even through some very strong winds.

Every now and again I’d look at them and they’d be unchanged. Until March, when I found one on the ground and both of them looked deflated.

So hoping that meant they were mature, I tore them open to see what was inside. In one was just debris, and in the other there were maybe 20 or so tiny yellow spiderlings moving around (they’re hard to see, but they’re the small yellow bumps in the photo below. Given that each sac probably started with hundreds of eggs each, I deduce that the hatching was complete and that the few babies left in the sac were lingerers on their way out. The sac was filled with a fibrous material, presumably silk.