Foraging, spiders and webs

We have been doing a lot of blackberry picking this last week or two - it seems to have been a good year for them and I have found a couple of new spots to forage in. Whenever we are blackberry picking there always seems to be loads of spiders webs so I thought this would be a good topic for our nature study this week.The boys were quite keen but Amy not so much!

I looked in the Handbook of nature study for some inspiration and set the boys some things to observe.

Luke wasn't happy to observe the spiders on their webs - he wanted to experience them first hand!

Here are some new facts we discovered:

• Spiders have 4 pairs of eyes (we couldn't observe these when we looked at the spiders - will have to look again) 
• Spiders webs are often placed vertically so they are better placed to catch their prey -we did see this!
• There are different kinds of silk spun by the spiders - in an orb web the radial silks, guy lines and framework are made of non sticky inelastic silk and the threads that go round in a spiral are sticky and elastic. An insect that touches these cannot escape! However the clever spider when detecting an intruder will run along the dry radii and not the sticky spiral. We tested this by touching the different silks with the end of a pencil - amazing design.

We watched this video of a spider building a web.

On our way home we discovered some hazelnuts and had our first taste of fresh hazelnuts - yum