I’ve found this beauty the last few years waiting for her dinner on her web woven on my Red Hot Pokers (Kniphofia).

Orb-weaver spiders are members of the spider family Araneidae and are the most common group of builders of circular webs.

Araneids have eight similar eyes, hairy or spiny legs and no stridulating organs. (These organs are special structures for producing mechanical sounds.)

Most orb weavers appear in the spring but are not noticed until summer or fall. The most-noticed on the web is the female since she sits on her web, feeding and eventually waiting for the males to find her.

Toward the end of fall, she will lay her clutches of eggs and then die at the first frost. The male orb weavers are much smaller than females and the male’s role is to mate with the female. Since the males are small, it’s not uncommon for them to become the female’s first meal after mating.

A single egg sac can contain several hundred eggs with juvenile orb weavers able to spin perfect orb webs.

They start building their web by floating a line on the wind to another surface, The spider secures the line and then drops another line from the center, making a “Y.” The rest of the scaffolding follows with many radii of non-sticky silk being constructed before a final spiral of sticky capture silk.

One feature of these webs is the thick zigzag of a band of silk through the center of the web called the stabilimentum. This band may be a marker to warn birds away from the web, a lure for prey and camouflage for the spider when it sits in the web.

The spiders can shake their web vigorously while remaining in the center allowing them to warn away larger creatures. This also helps entangled insects before they get loose or fall off.

Should the spider move off the web she will hide nearby, aware of prey becoming trapped in the web by a trap line of silk that will vibrate and alert her. This allows her to return to the web, bite and paralyze the prey and wrap it in silk for a later meal.

Flies, beetles, wasps and mosquitoes are examples of insects that make up the spider’s diet.

Despite their size, these spiders are not aggressive but will bite if grabbed or provoked. Their bite is harmless to humans and feels like a bee sting.

With the large size of their webs, you should be safe not walking into one and getting your day of cardio!

To learn more about these beautiful spiders, go to: https://go.osu.edu/yellowspider

Baytos is an Ohio State University Extension Master Gardener Volunteer in Mahoning County.