Our Orkin EEKologist Project

posted by Stacie on October 25, 2013 // 83 Comments »

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of The Orkin Ecologist for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Insects. Bugs. Creepy, crawly creatures. Some people fear them, but at Orkin, they study them.

Orkin knows that every creature has its place on the planet and that the best way to control pests is to learn as much as we can about them in general, both the bad and the good. They have been studying bugs for 100 years and they even have scientists on staff to ensure they keep science at the forefront of their work.

Orkin is continuously taking the insect insights they gain and applying them to their business. This practice has made Orkin better at what they do. In studying bugs to better control them, they have found that they are fascinated by them too — they’re curious little creatures full of unexpected complexity.

Orkin created “The Ecologist” site, to celebrate science and uniqueness of bugs. The Orkin Ecologist is a really cool website that gives you all kinds of great information including projects and facts.

We first found this article: Learn How Spiders Build The Perfect Orb Web and then we did lots of research on spiders. and finally settled on the Wolf Spider which is very common around here in Georgia. We have many of them in webs all around our house. My entire family is fascinated by them.

We decided that we would create the largest spider web that we could find as our EEK-ologist fear factor project. We have some great trees in our yard and knew that this would be perfect. Our mission was to build the perfect Orb Web.

Learn How Spiders Build The Perfect Orb Web

My son put together this little project to tell everyone about the Wolf Spider:

We needed to go shopping for spiders and webs. Since it is close to Halloween, it was pretty easy to find everything that we needed.

Of course, this little spider below didn't make it into the web because it wasn't a wolf spider. But we did buy it so we could use it in another part of our house.

The first thing that we did was put up the webs and stretch them across all of the trees while keeping them still together. This took quite a while.

How great does this look? My kids did a fabulous job of building a huge spider web and putting the spiders in. In fact, people have been stopping by to take pictures.