Archive for The Gathering Place "The Gathering Place" is a web community where people can gather and make new friends, share ideas, enjoy a few laughs and learn about many interesting things together. It is a safe place where friends can correspond with each other about what they love.
I was out in a field near Domino farms taking photos of the sunflowers when my wife says "Honey, there's something on your back!" I asked her what it was and she said she didn't know. She borrowed the camera and took a photo, and it was this praying mantis. My wife bravely got the creature to climb on her arm, and she placed it on a nearby sunflower.
(The photo is rotated 90 degrees to the right so the mantis is horizontal instead of vertical for clarity.)
Mary
We have them in 3 colors, straw, brown, and green. The females become very fat looking before they make their egg nest, and the males always look slender. I'll try to post a picture of the egg nest, we watched a female make one but that was before we got the digital camera.
smokey the dog
Mary wrote:
We have them in 3 colors, straw, brown, and green. The females become very fat looking before they make their egg nest, and the males always look slender. I'll try to post a picture of the egg nest, we watched a female make one but that was before we got the digital camera.
I have seen mostly the large green ones. I think this photo is one of the few large brown ones I have seen.
Mary
These egg cases start out looking like foam and they harden in a few minutes. We find them stuck to firewood, fence posts and rails, twigs, and other odd places.
Mary
smokey the dog
Yea, I found one once, brought it home, and placed it in the yard but as far as I could tell it never hatched.
Mary
Yesterday when I was doing some vegetable garden clean up, removing the old brocolli plants and putting them on the compost pile, I found 2 female mantis full of eggs and one male mantis. They now reside in my greenhouse. I also found 2 mantis egg cases, not sure what I will do with them.
Once I put a mantis egg case in a big jar and waited and waited for it to hatch. When it did, I missed it, and a few days later I looked and there was one lone survivor, a little brown fellow about half an inch long, standing on the egg case waving his front legs just like the adults do. Around the egg case were the rest of his siblings, unfortunately I hadn't been checking the jar often enough and they had perished. The survivor and the egg case were put outside under a bush. I've often wondered if he grew up or became dinner for another critter in the food chain.
