My Hero!

[kath]

Originally Posted by austinnhanasmom

For the past few years, I have annually purchased praying mantis cocoons on ebay. If you PM me, I'll look up the seller. She's on the east coast somewhere and collects the egg sacs in the wild.

These sacs could be placed outside for hatching or hatched in an enclosure for future release.

The pain of hatching inside is that they need to be fed and misted often, after hatching. It's easy for me to obtain fruit flies for feeding, but I forget to mist....

I googled which varieties would survive our winters and the most common, Chinese, usually does not survive here. European and Carolina varieties will. They can be i.d.ed by body markings and egg shape. The Carolina seems less hearty in Colorado, but the European does really well and I've found a few egg cases in my yard.

The males seem to fly away and then sometimes return, but the females stay closer - tending to my garden! I don't know what they eat here, since spiders are rampant, but they make my day!

Never thought of this- thanks for the suggestion. Sending a PM.

[lakelady]

Those BMSBs creep me out. One gets into the house and they make noise when they fly, then land on something with a sound akin to a "thump". They are not graceful. They land on the screen in my office while I'm on the computer and I hear that thud like they are slamming into it.

I was wondering, for the small gardener, could you use bagging as a form of keeping the fruits free of bites? Some sort of covering over the tomatoes once they set fruit so they would still grow but be protected in some way?