Leah and I bought some plants yesterday and planted them this afternoon. There were quite a few yellowjackets and wasps flying around as I worked outside, and I kept thinking they were lighting on the back of my neck. It turned out it wasn’t yellowjackets or wasps, it was ladybugs.

Ladybugs swarming around the front door

All those black spots are ladybugs. Our house is painted a medium gray, but the area around the front door is white. There were some ladybugs on the siding, but far more on the white area around the door. I assumed from this that they are attracted to lighter colors, and at least one Web site confirmed that idea. They were all over the white garage doors and frames, but not inside the garage. All afternoon we had to use the garage to leave or reenter the house so we wouldn’t let all the ladybugs in the front door.

This is a closer shot of a ladybug at bottom right.

Ladybug and friend

There are two things about this photo to notice. One is the orange spots all over the railing. I think those are blood spots. If you have picked up a ladybug, you might have ended up with some of this on your hand. They release blood when they are stressed. The other thing is the bug at top left. I think this is actually an Asian lady beetle. Instead of the bright red of a ladybug, it has a more yellowish color. I noticed a fair number of them in addition to genuine ladybugs.

Today was the first day we have seen ladybugs swarming. In fact, they weren’t around until about mid-afternoon, and then suddenly they were everywhere. Later in the evening, many of them had dispersed. I hope they found a nice, warm place to overwinter, and I hope that place is not our attic.

After I finished planting, I had some leftover dirt, so I took it into the back where I’m trying to make a level path across our septic leach field. I had placed some rocks as a little retaining wall, and I wanted to move them and widen the path. When I moved the last rock, this is what I found.

Another lady

You can barely see the red marking on her abdomen. When I first uncovered her, the hour-glass shape was visible, but by the time I got back with my camera, she had moved. I have found enough black widows around the yard that I’m careful when I turn over rocks or old boards. Finding one no longer startles me, but I am always appreciative of its beauty. That round, shiny, black abdomen is hard to mistake, even when you can’t see the red hourglass.

I usually leave them alone. In this case, I used a shove shovel to move her along with the rock she was using as her lair to a different place. I hope she finds a nice place to spend the winter, too, but not in our house.

I mentioned earlier that there are a lot of spiders around at this time of year. A few days ago when I took the dogs for their morning walk, I saw this:

The neighborhood is getting crowded

The lighting conditions were good to get all three of these spider webs. They were illuminated from behind, so the webs show up well against the darker background of trees in shadow.

If you look carefully you might be able to see all three spiders at work repairing their webs.

One of the amazing things about these spiders is how far they go to support a web. There is one behind our house that has one support strand that stretches about 20 feet to our deck.

Our front-door spider scrunches up in a corner during the day.

Spider’s hiding place

There’s a lot of dark specks and stuff, but the dark blob in the corner is the spider. Even up close it’s hard to tell what it is.

When it starts to get dark, the spider comes out.

Slowly I turned

Here it is in the vertex of its ragged web.

Ragged web

I had thought spiders (at least some spiders) repaired their webs every night, but apparently this web still works OK. It’s not really this dark, but the flash completely overwhelms the background here.

And here it is, up close and personal.

A little too close for comfort

It looks prickly. Not too inviting to pet.

I have had to wave a stick in front of my face when I walk the dogs into the woods lately. It’s not to ward off lions, although it seems to do that, but to keep the spider webs off my face. I see big, old wolf spiders running across the driveway. They aren’t quite big enough to hunt cats yet, but I almost expect to hear their footsteps as they run. I see their eight tiny eyes glinting in the beam of my flashlight when I take the dogs for their last walk of the evening. They seem to be everywhere now.

A few days ago we discovered that a spider had woven its web right outside our front door. Of course we discovered it by running into it.

Spidey outside the door

I misted the web with our cat corrector, but it’s really hard to photograph a spiderweb with a bright background. Here it is from the other direction. Not much better here.

Watch your head

You can tell that it’s right at head height as we come out the door. I’m going to ask it to clean the boards around our front door during the day when it’s usually inactive.

Another spider recently started its web between the high posts at the end of our front walk, where we mounted the gate that was supposed to keep Zeke on the walk, but which he climbs to chase foxes. You can see the tops of the posts in the first picture. That web is high, but there are some anchor lines that run down right where we walk.

Having to pull invisible spider webs off of your face is a little annoying, but I like having the spiders around anyway.