I have discovered the hornet's nest responsible for stealing most of my spiders. This is war.
yay! go DD! i love spiders.
There will be a few more argiopes grow to breeding age in my garden after today.
It was the relatively small kind of hornets (one inch long) which burrow into the ground to make nests, carry their captured, paralyzed prey into the burrow and lay their eggs on them so the maggots can feed (on MY spiders!!), as they grow. I had to dig about a foot and a half deep to find the center (and I only got stung once), but I got them all ... well, all the larvae and tending workers, anyway, and I put my beloved spiders out of their respective miseries. No poisons, either! Manual extermination, with a little help from the curious robins. I waited too long, though, since we were already overrun by night pests when I noticed the absence of spiders.