WILD WEDNESDAY

Mr HCB has gone off to cricket, and is well settled there with sunshine and blue sky.  I’ve just spoken to my doctor, who says I am doing the right thing with bending my finger back gently when it triggers,  but she will prescribe some anti-inflammatory cream or I could take ibuprofen.  If neither of these work, then she suggests another injection and if that doesn’t work perhaps an operation.  I think I’ll try the cream first and maybe a cream cake too - although that wasn’t part of the prescription!  

Earlier, I decided that it would be a good idea to pop out and have a wander in the garden to see if there was anything worth photographing. I could see that the many spiders that I have seen in the garden of late have been extremely busy and this morning many of the webs were covered with tiny dew drops, like this one on Mr. HCB's chrysanthemums. 

The more I saw, the more I wanted to see so I just ended up wandering around the garden and being enthralled by all these wonderful webs, spun by our resident spiders. I have to say, that I’m not terribly happy about the large spiders being in our house but I’m quite happy for them to be in the garden and to be doing their work out there.  

Seen their handiwork, it got me thinking how long it took them to spin a web, what they actually did this for, and how long will they lasted?  I understand from Mr. Google that, on average, it takes a spider 30-60 minutes to spin a web - with silk produced in silk glands, with the help of special organs called spinnerets that allows the spider to decide what typeof thread it needs for spinning.  These can be thick or thin, dry or sticky, beaded or smooth. The threads a spider uses to construct its web begin as liquid, but they dry quickly in the air.

The main reason for spinning these webs is for the spider to catch its dinner or to protect its eggs.  They also use them for transport;  they climb to a high point and then release one or more strands of silk, which get caught by the breeze and then that carries them away.  How often have you walked into a web?  At the moment, I do it more times than I would like!

I guess that most of the ones I saw were spun by orb weavers as they are typically nocturnal spiders and many species will build or do repair work on their webs at night.  If an insect is trapped in the web by the sticky thread, that then vibrates so the spider rush to the web, bites and paralyses its prey and then wraps it in silk for later consumption.

How clever and fascinating is all that?  

“So many people are hanging on
     by the thinnest of threads. 
          Treat all people well. 
               You could be that thread.”
John Pavlovitz

P.S.  Many thanks for all your kind comments yesterday - I am trying not to use my hand too much, because it’s still very painful, but hopefully, when I get the cream, I am hopeful it will make a difference.