When visiting me this past weekend, my children were excited to see a huge yellow and black spider in my garden. My daughter took the above photograph of the spider.
I have noticed what seems to be a larger than usual number of spiders in my garden. I didn’t know if I were imagining this but learned that because of the earlier hot weather this year, which had the flowers bloom about 3 weeks early, spiders are also in the garden earlier. They are out and about a month earlier this year.
The beautiful, huge yellow and black spider in my garden is an Argiope aurantia spider. This is a beneficial spider that catches such insects as the Asian tiger mosquito, the eastern yellow jacket, the carpenter ant and the Virginia Pine sawfly in its orb web. Unfortunately even beneficials, like the garter snake, do not discriminate between the bad and the good. The garter snake eats some good guys in the garden like the toads and the argiope spider also eats some good or beneficial insects. But the beneficial work it does outweighs the bad, so we have to protect these beneficial insects and beneficial snakes.  For more on the argiope spider read this.