Nov
Silk Garden
Posted in Yarn | No Comments »How long will a garden spider (Argiope aurantia) live indoors in the winter? And...?
And will they take to being handled / silk-farmed?
Well, in warmer climates, the females can live up to three years; but the males don't last nearly as long. I'm assuming you're talking about keeping a female indoors. You'll have to keep her in a nicely warm place, and have a water source nearby- spiders don't drink nearly as often as people or other vertebrates, but they still need water from time to time.
You may carefully handle her, but I don't know how well you'll do in silk-farming and I don't recommend it. In order to get any kind of useful amount of silk, you would need several hundred spiders. No one has been able to successfully farm spider silk- the number one problem being spiders kept together will eat each other.