Before a spider lays her eggs, she spins some web on the ground. She goes over it again and again, spinning all the time, till it looks like a piece of gauze. Into this she lays her eggs—often over a hundred—and covers them with more web and then wraps them up into a round ball. I don’t suppose you would think it, but a spider is a very devoted mother, and this white ball is so precious to her that she carries it everywhere she goes and never lets it out of her sight. She will hold it for hours in the sun to help to hatch the eggs, and she would fight anything that tried to hurt it or take it away from her.
It is the same when the eggs are hatched out, for her babies are always with her. Their home is on her back, and as there is such a swarm of them, they cover her right up and you often can’t see the spider for the young. Often some of them drop off, but they are active little things and they soon climb on again. As long as they live with their mother they have nothing to eat. This fasting, however, doesn’t seem to hurt them for they are very lively; the only thing is they don’t grow.
It doesn’t seem to matter very much even to grown-up spiders to go without their dinners for several days. And when they do at last get some food they gorge. They eat and eat and eat, and instead of making themselves ill like you would do, they seem to feel very comfortable and are able to go hungry again for some time. Perhaps it is because, as babies, they got used to doing without food.
Spiders love fine weather.
Spiders love fine weather, and they seem to know when to expect the sun to shine. When it is a bright day Mother Spider brings out her big little family. It is no good offering them any food, for they can’t eat it yet, so she finds a sheltered hot place and gives them a thorough sun bath, which they like better than anything else.
And now one more little story before we say “Good-by” to spiders. When Emma was a tiny baby she had thirty-nine brothers and sisters. And as she was just a tiny bit smaller than the others, she was very badly treated. The stronger ones would be very rough and cruel to her. They used to walk over her and push her near the edge where she would be likely to fall off. Two or three times they had crowded her so that she really had slipped off and lay sprawling on the ground. However, she was very nimble and agile, and she had always been able to pick herself up quickly and clamber up one of her mother’s legs on to her back again.
One day the little spiders were more spiteful than usual. “You are a disgrace to us,” they told Emma, “you might be a silly ant.”
“I’m no more an ant than you,” said Emma, “I can’t help being small.”
“Ant, ant, ant!” they cried, “ants belong on the ground and that’s your proper place,” and pushed her off on to the ground.
The unlucky part was that Emma’s mother didn’t know what had happened, and before Emma could struggle to her feet, she had hurried away having noticed a bird hovering near. There was Emma all alone, a poor lost little spider without a mother or a home.
She was feeling very sad and wondering what would become of her, when along came another Mother Spider with a lot of babies on her back. Two of these fell off quite near to Emma, and when they ran back to their mother she ran with them. Up an unknown leg she climbed and on to a strange back, and yet she felt quite as happy and at home as if it had been her own mother and the companions she joined had been her real brothers and sisters. How different spiders are from us! Emma’s mother never knew she had lost a baby, and the new mother didn’t bother herself at all that she had adopted one, and as for the strange brothers and sisters, they treated her rather better than her own, for they happened to be just a little smaller than Emma so were not strong enough to push her off. As far as Emma was concerned it was decidedly a change for the better, and she was really a very lucky little spider.