The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1895-09-19
RAISING SPIDERS.
An Odd Industry Carried on in Penn
sylvania.


sylvania.
Although entomologists have often
raised spiders for purposes of scientific
observation and investigation, spider
raising as q money-making industry is
something rather novel. One has only
to go four miles from PHILADELPHIA, on
the old Lancaster pike, and ask for the
farm of Pierre Grantaire to see what
can be found nowhere else in this coun-
try, and abroad only in 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 cellar with new,
shining, freshly labeled bottles, and in
three mon tbs see them yelled with
tilmy cobwebs, so that the effect of
twenty years of storage is secured at a
small cost. The effect upon a custom
er can be imagined, and is hardly to be
measured in dollars and cents. 1t is
triting matter to cover the bins with
dust, but to cover them with cobwebs
Spun from COth W COTh, anu JndG IRA pc
the ne ok like delicate lace, the seal of
years of slow mellowing, that is diff
ferent matter TIE walls of Mr.. Gran
taire's spider house are covered with
wire squares from six inches to foot
across, and behind these screens the
walls are covered with roug h plank
ing. There are cracks between the
boards apparently left with design,
and their weatherbeaten surfaces are
dotted with knot holes and splintered
crevices Long tables running the
length of the room are covered with
small wire frames, wooden boxes and
glass jars. All of these wires in the
room are covered with patterns of lace
drapery, in the geometrical outlines
fashioned by the spider artists. The
sunlight streaming through the door
shows the room hung with curtains of
elfn-woven lacework.
1t is not all kinds of spiders that
make webs suitable for the purposes
of the merchant, and those selected by
Mr.. Grantaire are species that weave
fine, large ones of lines and circles.
They are the only webs that look
artistic in the wine cellar or on the
bottles. The spiders that weave these
are principally the Epeira vulgaris and
Nephila plumipes.
When Mr., Grantaire has an order
from wine merchant, he places the
spiders in small paper boxes, pair in
box, and ships them in a crate with
many holes for the ingress of air. The
price asked, ten dollars a hundred,
well repays the wine merchant who, at
an expenditure of forty or fifty dol
lars, may sell his stock of wine for
thousand or more dollars above what
he could have obtained for it before
the spiders dressed his bottles in the
robes of long ago Mr.. Grantaire has
on hand at u time, ten thousand
spiders, old and young, the eggs of
some of which, the choicest, he obtains
from France.
When the mother spider wishes to
lay her eggs she makes a small web in
broad crack, then she lays, say, fifty
eggs, which she covers with a soft silk
cocoon. In two weeks Tor longer in
winter the eggs begin to hatch, an OPP
Grafton that takes one or two days.
The eggshells crack off in flakes and
the young spiders have a struggle to
emerge. Then they begin to grow,
and in week look like spiders. They
often moult and shed their skins like
snakes The brood has to be sep
arated at tender age, else the MEM
bers of the family would devour each
other until only one was left.-Phila-
delphia Times.