Garden Rehab

This lovely garden huntress is the Orchard Orb Weaver or Orchard Spider ( Leucauge  venusta ).  Over the summer she spun her web from our deck to the nearby by tree. By the look of her, she was very well fed.   Spiders consume an astonishing number of insects every year. According to  S piders of Toronto: A Guide to their Remarkable World :* Spiders are estimated to eat about 200 kg of insects per hectare per year. In a city the size of Toronto, this amounts to an astonishing 12 million kg of insects per year – equivalent to the body weight of over 150,000 average-sized people every year! Research shows that just two of the spider species living at Highland Creek in Scarborough eat 2 of every 100 insects that develop in the creek. This includes large numbers of mosquitoes. Multiply this estimate by the 40 or so other spider species likely to live around the creek, and suddenly the impact of spiders is clear. Spiders have a similar effect in gardens, where they eat biting

Over the summer, the native flowers we planted attracted a wide range of pollinators, including a number of native bee species. Using the City of Toronto's useful (and well illustrated) resource, Bees of Toronto: A Guide to Their Remarkable World , I've done my best to identify these garden visitors in the photos below (hint: click the photos to seem them at full size). Once you start to look for these charismatic little creatures, they're surprisingly easy to find. Honey Bee + Butterfly Milkweed Bicoloured Agapostemon + Spiderwort Eastern Carpenter Bee + Great Blue Lobelia Honey Bee + Spotted Joe Pye Weed