It is always fun to be the first one up in the morning to be hiking along a trail in the Rockies.  You are the first one there to wander along the trail and discover what happened to the area during the night.

Well, at least it is mostly fun.  As a short dog I am able to run around and under things pretty easily.  But, sometimes when I am the first one on the trail and I run or jump along I do have the misfortune of running into a spider web.  It is always a weird feeling to be running along happily one minute and then the next minute to have a sticky web draped across my face.

I just don’t understand how that web gets there?  How can there be a spider web across the middle of a hiking trail?  That got me wondering how long does it take a spider to spin a web?

The typical circular shaped web is called an orb.  This is a round web with rings going out from the center.

There are many different kinds of spiders and it take different spiders different lengths of time to spin a web, but on average it takes about one hour for a spider to spin a web.

Surprisingly, at least for me, is that most spiders spin a new web every night.  Imagine that – every night they spend time and energy constructing another elaborate web that may simply be destroyed in the morning by a person or dog walking along.

Another surprising and strange fact about spider and their webs is that they eat their old webs.  By doing so they are recycling the material from their old web and turning it into silk threads for their new web.