Show SPIDER earsing the unique enterprise of a pennsylvania farmer win merchants bay the nd I 1 place them in their bellara cellara to weave ivea about the to glou them age although entomologists have often raised spiders for purposes pur potes of scientific observation and investigation spider raising as a moneymaking 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 Gran taire to see what can be found nowhere else in this country and abroad only in a little french village in the department of the loire pierre Gran taire furnishes spiders at so much per hundred for distribution in the wine vaults of merchants and the riches his trade is chiefly with the wholesale merchant who is able to stock a cellar with new shining freshly labeled bottles and in three months see them veiled with filmy cobwebs so that the effect of twenty years of storage is secured at a small cost the effect upon a customer can be imagined and is hardly to be measured in dollars and cents it is a trifling matter to cover the bins with dust but to cover them with cobwebs spun from cork to cork and that drape the ne ck like delicate lace the seal of years of slow mellowing that is a different matter the walls of air agrati baires spider house are covered with wire squares rom six inches to a foot across and behind these screens the walls are covered with rough planking there are cracks between the boards apparently left with design and their 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 elfin woven lace work it is not all kinds of spiders that make weba suitable for the purposes of the merchant and those selected by mr Gran taire are species that weave fine largae 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 and plum ipes when mr Gran taire has an order from a wine merchant he places the spiders in small paper boxes a pair in a box and blips 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 dollars may sell his stock 0 wine for a thousand or more dollars above what he could have obtained for it before the dressed his bottles in the robes of long mr has on hand at a time ten thousand spiders old and young the of some of which the choicest he obtains from france when the mother baider wishes to lay her she makes a small web in a broad crack then she lays say fifty which she covers with a soft silk cocoon in two weeks or loeper in winter the eggs baffin to hatch an operation that takes one or two days the eggshells egg shells crack off in flakes and the youns spiders have a to emerge then they bebin to prow and in a week look like spiders they often moult and shed their skies like snakes the brood has to be separated at a tender age else the members of the family would devour each other until only one was left philadelphia times |