Black / Brown Widow (Button) Spider

Here is, for me, an interesting one on the Brown Widow (also known as Button spiders) Spider. This young lady made her nest in the gate at the office and I managed to get a few nice shots of her. What we discovered was that there are two varieties, the Black and the Brown Widow Spider. Of these two, the Brown Widow, pictured here, is the more dangerous of the two. But she is tiny, only about 4mm (less than half an inch) in diameter. Some of the species are very colorful and are not only black as I had previously thought.

Markings on the back....

and on the stomach.

Spider and egg - False Button Spider (Steatoda capensis)

I found this small spider at work and put it in a plastic film bottle to take home and photograph. When I opened it up, I discovered she had laid a large size egg inside.
I decided to let her loose outside and gently moved her and the egg onto the ground next to a tree.
No sooner was she out and tried to move her egg to a place of safety, when the ants came along and tried to take it away from her. I thought that she would chase them away.
Instead, she gave up and went to huddle against the tree leaving her eggs to the ants to carry away.

Food storage - False Button Spider (Theridion delicatum) Theridiidae

Over the weekend I was sorting out some old papers which were in a blue plastic trunk and when I took it outside to clean and turned it over I found this.......
Sitting nearby was a tiny False Button Spider........

I am not sure what these are but look like it might be crickets about to hatch.

and I am sure that this was her food supply for her babies when the are born.

I did a previous article on them, please click here to see it and read more on this interesting spider: Black / Brown Widow Spider