I have been keeping an eye on the courgette patch for the last couple of days, hoping to see the spider with her babies.  Well,  the babies have now hatched, but it appears that I made a wrong identification.

This morning, the spider was standing guard over a web full of spiderlings, meaning that this is in fact a Nursery Web Spider, and not a Wolf Spider as previously thought.

Apparently the Nursery Web spider carries the egg sac in her jaws, meaning that she cannot feed until the babies have hatched, now there’s a devoted mother for you.

I have taken a couple of shots showing the spider standing guard over the web, and I will post these shortly.