We were reviewing some of our old pictures on the computer the other day because we are having a contest at work. The company has just finished renovating their customer hospitality suite and they realized that the walls seemed somewhat bare and bleak. Since a lot of their clients arrive from outside of the country without any idea of just how beautiful this area can be it was decided that it would be fun to ask the staff to submit their photos to decorate the walls. There is a prize of $100 for each of four pictures selected but it will be great just to have one of ours picked to be representative of our community to the world!
Anyway, spiders and summer, yeah, back to that. A couple of years ago we were touring around Atlantic Canada, doing the Bed and Breakfast thing for the first time. It was an absolutely perfect vacation with amazing sights, great accommodations and food and it was lots of fun. It was fantastic and just about the best time we have ever had on holiday. In fact, it was only bettered by the trip we took to the west coast with my father and my sister several years ago.
When we got home from the B&B trip one of the first things we did was check the vegetable garen to see how it made out while we were away. We were only gone five days but that can be a long time for a garden to go without watering. It turned out that everything survived just fine without us, including the pumpkins. It was while we were checking out the pumpkin patch that we first ran into the little bugger you see above.
That, dear readers, is the "Black and Yellow Garden Spider, Writing Spider, Banana Spider or Corn Spider" according to Wikipedia. The females, like the ones pictured here, can range from 19 to 28 mm in length and, in my opinion, are very beautiful. Harmless too, apparently. Her web is "a circular shape up to 2 feet in diameter, with a dense zigzag of silk, known as a stabilimentum, in the center". This is almost as distinctive as the spider, herself.
Now, whenever I see one of these in the yard or even one of these pictures I am transported back to the summer of '07, Wolfville, Yarmouth, Halifax and Mahone Bay. It's funny how memory works but for me the Banana Spider equals summer in the Maritimes.
