Page:Supplement to harvesting ants and trap-door spiders (IA supplementtoharv00mogg).pdf/116

 I have watched the proceedings of the young spiders, when taken from the mother's nest, in the following species: Nemesia Manderstjernæ, N. Eleanora, N. congener, and N. Moggridgii, the three first constructing wafer, and the last a cork nest. All of these very young spiders will excavate their own tubes and bring out pellets of the earth, which closely resemble those carried out from their galleries by the ants.

As has been stated before, the young brood, while still in the mother's nest, will often comprise individuals of different sizes, and though the majority are no larger than the baby-spider represented at Fig. B 2, Pl. IX., Ants and Spiders, some may occasionally be found that are fully twice as large.

The little nests which they make in captivity vary accordingly in size. Thus, out of sixteen young taken from the mother's nest (N. Eleanora), eleven, three days after capture, had made nests in the earth of a flower-pot, and the wafer doors of six of these nests measured 2 lines across, of four 2-1/2 lines, and of one 3 lines. The first nests of another similar lot of young Eleanora spiders had wafer doors measuring respectively 2, 2-1/2, 2-1/2, 3 and 3 lines. In another case when I captured fourteen young (the entire brood found in the nest of the mother, N. Manderstjernæ), after the lapse of five days every one of them had made a nest, but these were smaller and more uniform, ten of the wafer doors measuring 2 lines across, one 1-1/2, and one 2-1/2.

These little spiders need to be kept constantly supplied with flies, which should be killed and placed near their nests; they are often so greedy that they will