244 AMERICAN SPIDERS AND TIIEFH SPINNINGWORK. 



These beetles were food for the young housekeepers, but Mrs. Treat 

 thought that they were not to their taste as much as flies, although they 

 dared not as yet take a living house fly, and if one came near them they 

 quickly dodged within their burrows. If a fly were killed and laid on 

 the tower, however, they would try to take it within, but it being impos- 

 sible to do this with the wings and legs adhering, they made many in- 

 genious but futile attempts to get the large carcass inside the burrow. If 

 .the wings and legs were removed from the insect, and laid upon the tower, 

 the carcass was soon carried below and after a few hours was brought up 

 to dry and thrown out. 1 



In November the Tiger spiders all hermetically close their doors and 

 keep them shut until the following April, when they again come forth, 

 the females each with a cocoon of eggs attached to the spinner- 

 ets. The eggs hatch in May, and the young spiders crawl upon 

 the mother's back, literally covering her body. After a few days 

 they leave her, and all at once come rushing out of the burrow. For two 

 or three months these young spiders flit about here and there over bushes 

 and on the lower branches of trees, seemingly ambitious to get to higher 

 places. 



Toward the end of July their roving lives cease, and they settle down 

 and dig little burrows in the earth, which they do not conceal the first 

 season. The wasps do not molest the young ones. The following spring, 

 when a year old, they are little more than half grown, and during the 

 summer they grow rapidly and moult several times, each time changing 

 their appearance. By August they seem to be nearly full grown, when 

 their enemy, the wasp, makes havoc among them. By thus tracing the 

 life history of this spider we find it to be two years old before the first 

 brood of young are hatched, and, if no accident befalls it, it probably lives 

 several years. 2 



XIII. 



Mr. Frederick Enock 3 determined the manner in which the young of 

 Atypus piceus issue from the parental nest, and their subsequent behavior. 



October 15th he dug up five tubes, each containing a male and 

 oun.g female. The males were removed, and the tubes containing the 



impregnated females were reset in a bank at the bottom of a 

 garden, and were kept under daily notice during the seasons following. 

 March 28th of the next year the aerial extensions of the tubes, which dur- 

 ing the winter had laid nearly flat upon the bank, showed signs of being 

 repaired by the inmates. On the next day in the apex of each of the 

 five tubes there was observed a small round hole one-sixteenth of an inch 



1 Mrs. Mary Treat, "Home Studies in Nature," Harper's Majia/inc, May, 1880. 

 3 Idem, page 712. " Trans. Ento. SOP. Lond., 188o, page 395. 



