Orb Weaver Spider

I have one that has built her nest by my moon flowers on my front porch. She is very beautiful and large (about the size of a quarter now), and keeps some of the night insect population down. Every dawn she balls her web up, eats it, and then scurries away to hide until evening when she comes out to dazzle us with her 1337 web building skills.

I have one on my sliding glass door. She comes every evening, builds her web, and takes it down (most of it) and departs at daylight. She is neat, building her radial web near an outdoor light. Her markings are fascinating. On her underside she has a "flag" with a black cross on a white rectrangular background surrounded by a brownish orange. As tiem has gone on, her body has tended toward gray. Onher topside, she has a set of has marks like the ones shown on this photo. I can't figure out a way to photograph her. Does she have a name beyond Orb Weaver Spider (Neoscona arabesca)?

I am sure this 'bug' is good for the garden, yet, for some reason, most of these huge, beautifully designed webs are erected right across a pathway, and they seem to be trying to catch me more often than smaller prey. I can not even guess how many webs I've walked right through, then to scramble away as a large, fat-bodied brown spider rushes across my face or over my head in an attempt to abort it's mission. I have no idea where these spiders hide most of the year, but they magically appear about the middle of July and by August there are hundreds of them making webs all over the place. Compared the haphazard, ugly webs of the black widows in the yard, these are magnificent, huge masterpieces.. yet flimsy. I have seen small grasshoppers hop right through one leaving a small, grasshopp... read moreer-sized hole behind. A grasshopper hardly has a chance in a black widow web. These must be designed for little moths and flies that are too wimpy to blast their way through. Sometimes if a only a section of the web tears lose as I wander through, the spider will often run to the edge of the web and gather up the rest of the web, like it's gonna use it somewere else (no idea if they do or not). Relatively harmless spiders... but they DO bite occasionally- hurts, too, and leaves a little welt.