My Garden Spider

Every spring I look for argiope aurantia, commonly know as the Black and Yellow Garden Spider. If you don't like spiders, this variety is considered harmless to humans. With the elaborate web she weaves, I've come to enjoy watching these year after year. They start out each spring finding a spot where she will spend the rest of her days; tiny webs at first growing up to two feet across in late summer.
These Garden Spiders mate once a year, then lay their eggs at night and form a ball of silk around them. She guards her sack as long as she is able. As the fall nights cool, she becomes more frail and dies around the first hard frost. Her hatchlings, the size of a speck of dust, will exit the pod in the spring. The teenies then exude a strand of silk that gets caught by a breeze, and fly away...