Have you ever seen baby black widows that have just hatched from their eggs? We did yesterday.
It turns out that immature black widow spiders are not black at all. They are brown and white.
They do show one characteristic of their parents, however. They hang upside down from their webs.
The babies will string out single strands of silk and quickly disperse from where they hatched. In a few hours, you won’t know they were even around.
Where did the babies come from? Female black widows lay their eggs in drop-shaped silken bags hidden around flower pots or boards. They will then guard the egg sacs until the little ones hatch.
Now I need to go out and try to get a photograph of the spider wasp that was hunting for spiders this morning. I think she was looking for something bigger than those babies.
