To Harvest Silken Thread

The spider as an artist

Has never been employed

Though his surpassing merit

Is freely certified

By every broom and Bridget

Throughout a Christian land,

Neglected son of genius,

I take thee by the Hand.

-Emily Dickinson

Almost daily as I enter through the door of the barn, I am faced by silken thread. If the light is right, I duck my head just in time to dodge the delicate structure, but more often than not, I reach up to wipe away the threads that tickle my forehead.

If one is afraid of spiders, one dare not enter our cathedral we call our barn. For within, there remains decades of spider silk that has not only collected insects, but has gathered particles of dust and dirt that has blown in. I’m afraid my barn cleaning has remained on the back burner for literally a decade.

But what if I could devise a method to harvest the silk? I could then barter the silken twine to the neighborhood farmers to use as the twine that holds together their hay and straw bales.

Spider webs are strong in the sense that they're strong for their extremely small thickness. A strand of a spider web (called spider silk) is very thin, so we can easily break it, but if we could weave many strands together to a thickness of a climbing rope, this spider-web-rope would be many times stronger than the rope, even stronger than some types of steel. For comparison, the tensile strength (how much pulling force along the length of something you can apply before it breaks) of some steels are around 400 to 800 megapascals while silk from some spiders can have tensile strength of 1,000 megapascals. However, it is very difficult to get enough spider silk to make a thicker cable, and we do not yet have a way to use spider silk for practical purposes.

- http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=6105

Overnight a spider

Its web had spread

As morning broke

Light illumined a masterpiece of thread.

How can such a creature

So small and thin

Comprehend the dimensions

Of the space in which it spins?

CPW