A video of how ive been getting the joro spider webs, i take the support lines from their anchors first. This causes the females to run off (the males are usually more stubborn and sometimes drop down to the ground). They're not looking for a confrontation, but i still mind their locations in case they try to crawl on me. Their venom isn't fun but its also not strong enough to worry a human (save for an allergic reaction)
But yeah, i pretty much just steal their webs. They rebuild them if necessary. I can then twist the string, moving and overlapping fibers as necessary.
I pick debris out with my free hand (when I'm not holding a phone that is). Sometimes I'll be able to get a whole web; sometimes I'll have to just take the part that's within reach. their webs can be huge, communal behemoths with 1-3 females and like, 1-7 males each. Some support strings can be seemingly 10 feet long with strength to match.
The yellowness of the silk seems to be the source of the stickiness, especially in the central web. It washes off, but i imagine remnants of it remaining in the string is good for keeping it stuck together (similar to plant gums in cellulose cordage) The amount of stickiness seems to vary per web, maybe because of age? dunno on that count.
One cool thing i noticed was that one web i got to first, i collected it and thought nothing of it. I returned to that same bush and spider a couple days later, and it had drawn a squiggle on its web! It looked like a scuffed version of the zigzags you'll see on garden spider webs. Notably, they're both orb weavers (i think), so I wonder if it's an innate behavior? I've even seen a fee of the spiders shake their webs slightly, not as much as garden spiders though.
The finished string still has some debris. It's just gonna happen if you're not directly "silking" the spiders. According to a project in madagascar, over a million spider milkings would need to happen to make a spider silk shawl!
I havent been able to find as many as i did the first times i went looking, as my mom's decided to wage a war on them with an electric tennis racket. But the ones deep in the woods i can theoretically keep coming back to! I've also gotten a lot more efficient at collecting the silk and maximizing its use.
As much as theyre a harmful species here,it also is pretty futile to kill them. The neighboring yards all have them as well, as do the neighboring fields and woods. Might as well let them live, but still actively decrease the surface area of webs to help out the local bugs.
And that way, you get to practice a very niche sorta stringmaking! I take the tiny thread i wound around a stick, soak it in hot tap water briefly to loosen debris and decrease stickiness, and then i turn it two-ply. I just tie different "batches" together using a square knot
Above is two angles of the same spool, the double ply thread wrapped around it as neatly and parallel as possible. A nice variable golden yellow color, even if theres a bit of debris left. The spool is about an inch across in this photo with some overlapping threads, for reference.
So that's just a ramble about my spider silk ventures so far!
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