Orb-weaving spiders are those spiders that create webs in which flying or falling insects are captured. Many, such as the Banded Garden Spider, the Golden-silk Orb-weaver, and the tiny Orchard Spider are active during the day, some, such as the Tropical Orb Weaver are primarily active at night. Most create a new web each day. If you have a wooded area, you can often go out shortly after dark with a flashlight and find Tropical Orb-weavers as they begin to create their web for the evening. By morning the web is gone and the Tropical Orb-weaver is in hiding among dense vegetation.
Many orb-weavers create an area of dense webbing in the center of their web where they rest while waiting for an insect to fly into the web. Then they rush out on non-sticky strands of the web to quickly wrap their catch in spider-silk webbing. Males of all of the orb-weavers are much smaller than the females and often visit the female’s web, where they sometimes cling to the female’s abdomen. There he is safe since the female can’t reach him. None of our orb-weavers present a danger to humans.