1896.] ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. 239 



SPIDER FARMING. 



Although entomologists have often raised spiders for purposes 

 of scientific observation and investigation, spider raising as. a 

 money making industry is something rather novel. One ha* 

 only to go four miles from Philadelphia, on the old Lancasu r 

 pike, says a Philadelphia paper, and ask for the farm of Pierre 

 Grantaire to see what can be found nowhere else in this country, 

 and abroad only in a little French village in the department of 

 the Loire. 



Pierre Grantaire furnishes spiders at so much per hundred for 

 distribution in the wine vaults of merchants and the nouveaux 

 riches. His trade is chiefly with the wholesale merchant, who is 

 able to stock a cellar with new, shining, freshly labeled bottles, 

 and in three months see them veiled with filmy cobwebs, so that 

 the effect of twenty years of storage is secured at a small cost. 

 The effect upon a customer can be imagined, and is hardly to be 

 measured in dollars and cents. It is a trifling matter to cover 

 the bins with dust, but to cover them with cobwebs spun from 

 cork to cork, and that drape the neck like delicate lace, the seal 

 of years of slow mellowing, that is a different matter. The walls 

 of Mr. Grantaire' s spider house are covered with wire squares 

 from six inches to a foot across, and behind these screens the 

 walls are covered with rough planking. There are cracks between 

 the boards apparently left with design, and their weather-beaten 

 surfaces are dotted with knot holes and splintered crevices. 

 Long tables running the length of the room are covered with 

 frames, wooden boxes and glass jars. All of these wires in the 

 room are covered with patterns of lace drapery, in the geometical 

 outlines fashioned by the spider artists. The sunlight streaming 

 through the door shows the room hung with curtains of elfin- 

 woven lace-work. 



It is not all kinds of spiders that make webs suitable for the 

 purposes of the wine merchant, and those selected by Mr. Gran- 

 taire are species that weave fine, large ones of lines and circles. 

 They are the only webs that look artistic in the wine cellar on 

 the bottles. The spiders that weave these are principally the 

 Epeita vulgaris and Nephila plumipcs. 



When Mr. Grantaire has an order from a wine merchant he 

 places the spiders in small paper boxes, a pair in a box, and 

 ships them in a crate with many holes for the ingress of air. The 



