After all, this cutter of Bees’ throats is a pretty, a very pretty creature, despite her unwieldy paunch fashioned like a squat pyramid and embossed on the base, on either side, with a pimple shaped like a camel’s hump.  The skin, more pleasing to the eye than any satin, is milk-white in some, in others lemon-yellow.  There are fine ladies among them who adorn their legs with a number of pink bracelets and their back with carmine arabesques.  A narrow pale-green ribbon sometimes edges the right and left of the breast.  It is not so rich as the costume of the Banded Epeira, but much more elegant because of its soberness, its daintiness and the artful blending of its hues.  Novice fingers, which shrink from touching any other Spider, allow themselves to be enticed by these attractions; they do not fear to handle the beauteous Thomisus, so gentle in appearance.

Well, what can this gem among Spiders do?  In the first place, she makes a nest worthy of its architect.  With twigs and horse-hair and bits of wool, the Goldfinch, the Chaffinch and other masters of the builder’s art construct an aerial bower in the fork of the branches.  Herself a lover of high places, the Thomisus selects as the site of her nest one of the upper twigs of the rock-rose, her regular hunting-ground, a twig withered by the heat and possessing a few dead leaves, which curl into a little cottage.  This is where she settles with a view to her eggs.

Ascending and descending with a gentle swing in more or less every direction, the living shuttle, swollen with silk, weaves a bag whose outer casing becomes one with the dry leaves around.  The work, which is partly visible and partly hidden by its supports, is a pure dead-white.  Its shape, moulded in the angular interval between the bent leaves, is that of a cone and reminds us, on a smaller scale, of the nest of the Silky Epeira.

When the eggs are laid, the mouth of the receptacle is hermetically closed with a lid of the same white silk.  Lastly, a few threads, stretched like a thin curtain, form a canopy above the nest and, with the curved tips of the leaves, frame a sort of alcove wherein the mother takes up her abode.

It is more than a place of rest after the fatigues of her confinement:  it is a guard-room, an inspection-post where the mother remains sprawling until the youngsters’ exodus.  Greatly emaciated by the laying of her eggs and by her expenditure of silk, she lives only for the protection of her nest.

Should some vagrant pass near by, she hurries from her watch-tower, lifts a limb and puts the intruder to flight.  If I tease her with a straw, she parries with big gestures, like those of a prize-fighter.  She uses her fists against my weapon.  When I propose to dislodge her in view of certain experiments, I find some difficulty in doing so.  She clings to the silken floor, she frustrates my attacks, which I am bound to moderate lest I should injure her.  She is no sooner attracted outside than she stubbornly returns to her post.  She declines to leave her treasure.