Thursday 23 February 2012

Feed Your House Spider With Beef

If you want to keep your house spiders healthy in the Winter months when there are few flies about all you need is a bowl of boiled minced beef and a dog with a missing tooth who scatters bits of food around the floor.  ;>)

This is what happened a couple of days ago. An hour or so after Bobby had eaten some of his tea time meal I went in the kitchen. Once I had switched the lights on I noticed a large spider on the floor. Surprisingly it did not run away even when I bent down to have a close look. Nor did it move when I shone a torch right next to it. Why? It had found a small piece of Bobby's minced beef he had thoughtfully left on the floor. The spider was not going to lose its prize.

These four shots make up one picture which can be enlarged:
Spider and Minced Beef

I went back several times, took several photos, some illuminated with flash, others with an LED torch. Even though the Lumix TZ7 was just a couple of inches away from the spider it stayed put obviously treating the tasty morsel of beef the same way it would its natural prey.

For anyone who wants to know how to have several photos on one image with a transparent background - this was a slight modification of the process shown HERE on YouTube which explains how to add multiple photos using Photoshop Elements.  Instead of overlapping the photos as shown in the video I first cropped each one, added a border and then resized each one on a transparent layer so they stayed separate.

5 comments:

  1. What a wonderful idea John! I put mince on my bird feeders but have never thought of feeding my spiders! Wonderful!

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  2. I wouldn't have expected to see that John, well spotted and well captured!

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  3. I must try some mince on the bird feeders Maree.

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  4. Can't say I was expecting to see that Jan. Unfortunately the final shots I took showing the spider with its 'fangs' in the meat were out of focus.

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  5. OO! its scary looking even by my standards.

    Me in Minnesota

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Thank you for visiting. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. Any comment, or correction to any information or identification I get wrong, is most welcome. John

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