Hi all, Thanks Tom! Fawn and Rita, I'm with you both, nothing worse than a web in the face! I spend the next couple hours knocking invisible spiders off me and out of my air. I love these spiders but I love my hummers more :) So, if I see their webs anywhere near my hummingbird/butterfly plants I relocate the spider and take down the web. The webs are relegated to the woods, so far I have only seen the big old grasshoppers in the webs. Take care. Rhonda

and the ironic thing is that is just about any day now, the fall afternoons will be swarming with little ballooning baby spiderlings. And around here it is generally guaranteed that I will walk under a tree limb or something similar where they are just now dispersing and wind up with a head draped with scramblimg babies. At least that doesn't bother me. In fact, I really hate knowing that a few are going to get squashed even if I try to be careful helping them vacate premises. One year a spider stored her egg mass under the handle of my laundry basket, which I kept on a shelf above the washer and dryer. I was sorting things one day and reached in to press the start button and in doing so, leaned right into a solid wall of descending babies. Must have been like, F-Troop goes to rappelling school. And the first time I began to suspect something was up when I kept waving away what I thought was a gnat in front of my face. Only it would swing out and away in a slow graceful arc and then swing back in close, and I realized most gnats don't travel on a string. When I reached out and pinched off the tiny web and carried the spiderling over to a houseplant, I noticed more little gnats on strings appearing at various intervals in my peripheral vision. I realized what had happened, although it took some detective work on my part to track down the source since I had not been out yet that morning. By then my husband was dying laughing...his wife had spiders in her hair. It does conjure up images of aproned housewives dancing on kitchen chairs while a mouse runs around her feet, or a bat diving into a beehive hairdo on some FarSide matron. He doesn't know how lucky he is to have a woman like me.

And spider #3 up for ID, please!

I tried to get a picture from the top but she has her web on a slant so it's darn near impossible to get a shot. I don't want to tear her web up. They use up a lot of protein when they spin it.