Dear Readers, I’ve been idly watching this web appear in the corner of our French doors for the past few weeks, but only today did I summon up the energy to hobble over and have a proper look. And what a structure it is! You can see that it’s a sheet, but in the middle there’s a hole that looks a little like some vortex in the middle of a nebula (plus a pretty impressive tear).

From inside the house, you can just about see the long tube leading down to the bottom left corner of the window.  What I can’t see at the moment is a spider, but I might hobble outside with a torch at some point, provided I can convince my long-suffering husband to come with me so that I don’t topple over.

But who has made such a structure? Interestingly, it might well be one of our autumn visitors, the Common House Spider – I don’t think of these spiders as making webs, but apparently they do. Furthermore, several generations of Common House Spiders can use a web, enlarging it and repairing it as they go, rather like the aged retainers of a country house. The spider will live at the bottom of the tunnel, waiting for prey to land on the sheet part of the web. The vibrations that the unfortunate insect creates in its attempts to escape alert the spider, which rushes out and grabs it.

One reason that I might not have seen the spider on his/her web is that at this time of year, as we know, male Common House Spiders go in search of love, and enter our houses to look for the (much larger) females. When he finds one, he might spend several days or weeks with her, before dying, whereupon he is sometimes consumed by the female. No point in letting all those nutrients go to waste! Spiders are nothing if not pragmatic.

Incidentally, you can tell adult male spiders from adult females because the males have these little ‘boxing glove’ appendages at their front ends – these are pedipalps, and are used to transfer sperm from the male during mating.

A very impressive male Common House Spider (Photo By sanja565658 – «собственная работа», CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6228310)

Female Common House Spiders can live for several years if they find a house with suitable conditions. They lay their eggs in cream-coloured egg sacs, usually suspended by a strand of silk somewhere within the funnel web. I shall have to keep an eye open and see if I can see one! Each egg sac holds about 50 eggs, which will hatch in April when the spiderlings will disperse.

I always find it interesting how our homes and sheds and outbuildings form their own unique habitat. As far as a spider is concerned, our centrally-heated homes are just a rather pleasant substitute for the caves that they used to live in millenia ago. If only, I’m sure they’d say if they could talk, our homes weren’t so dry! One of the big risks for a spider in our homes is desiccation, and some of the ‘spider people’ that I talk to online regularly put out little bottle tops full of water for their spider friends to drink from. And considering the number of clothes moths that the average Common House Spider can eat, it might be a good investment.