A jewel of a spider...

The award for the prettiest spider I have seen so far in my garden has to go this tiny (about 5mm) female Jewel (or Christmas) spider (Austracantha minax).

I was very pleased when I spotted her busily spinning her web on a bush near my vegetable garden. Hard to get a good shot though - the wind kept blowing the web around, as always happens. Worth viewing large, I think.

Here is an underneath view of her, where you can see her making her web. The jewel spider belongs to the family of Araneidaeto, the Orb or Wheel weaving spiders and is very colourful, with six-spines and builds a vertical wheel web with 20 - 30 radii and a very close spiral design. (I didn't know all this, I had to look it up! My knowledge of bugs is growing through blip!)

This image was a very close contender for today's blip - I really like the cheeky look on this baby cricket's face as it popped up over the celery leaf to see me!

An early blip today, due to the mad rush from 3pm onwards - swimming lesson then about half an hour to get home, changed and off to the Year 6 graduation. It might take me a while to get to journals - again.

(A small note on the subject of journals: I don't subscribe to many journals purely because I do like to look at every entry and comment as often as I can - there are lots of journals I really like but don't subscribe to, because I know it would take over my life if I did! So if I don't do a reciprocal subscription, it's not because I don't think it's worthy, just that I'm trying to retain a semblance of control in my slightly out of control life!)