Praying Mantis Babies!

Last summer I purchased the "Praying Mantis Pagoda" from Insect Lore.  I had to wait until the winter to order my praying mantis egg for it (they only ship the eggs from January-April). The eggs themselves take about 3 to 7 weeks to hatch.  This particular egg arrived here from Insect Lore on March 15th.  In the past I had purchased my praying mantis eggs from my local Green Acres Nursery. Those eggs I would put directly outside. I bought this pagoda because after buying numerous eggs for my garden, I never got to see a single one hatch.  They always hatched- but I wanted to be able to watch them hatch!

Thanks to me catching pink eye (yeah, no fun!), and my daughter waking me up at 7am, I was home when the egg started hatching.  "Mommy! Mommy! THEY'RE HATCHING!"  At first I thought she was talking about the bird's nest on our front door (which, by the way- we've got four eggs there now, and we haven't opened our front door in over a week!).  But then she said "There's like a HUNDRED of them, and they are like a bunch of ants crawling all over the place!  They are ADORABLE!" 

Sure enough, she was right.  They are more like mosquitoes than ants, but there's well over a hundred of them, and at 11am, there are still more nymphs crawling out of the egg.  The fear that they would start eating each other hit and I didn't really feel up to explaining THAT part of nature to my daughter so I went outside in search of some aphids.  Thankfully I had just been outside in the garden the day prior to check out the leaf curl problem I was having with one of my peach trees and saw that it had some aphids on it too, so this morning I just clipped a small section of that tree and tossed it into the pagoda. 

Most of the praying mantises will be released into the garden within a couple of days.  Since we are in the middle of a rain storm outside, they kinda picked the WORST possible day to hatch, but we'll try to keep them alive and civil with one another until Saturday.  First sign of a mantis massacre and they'll be sent packing, released outside to brave the rain on their own. 

This is the egg, or the ootheca, and you can sort of see one of these little guys (or gals) climbing its way out of it on the right.  A female can lay up to 400 eggs in one of these things.  It's no wonder that she splits after she has them- who wants to take care of 400 kids?! I attached a video of the egg hatching- but bare with me, it was my first time adding video to a blog post!