Mantis, Party of 21...Your Table is Now Ready

So, the other day I bought some pink tulips for our dining room table. Tulips are my favorite, so I try my best to keep them around as long as I can. Yesterday when I got home, I took the tulips into the kitchen to change the water. I grabbed the tulips out of the vase, and when I looked down, I could not believe my eyes. Baron was walking in the door at that very moment when I stepped back from the counter with a look of shock on my face. What were those tiny bugs all over my flowers? Are those...praying mantises?? Yes! They were baby praying mantises! There were 4 or 5 of them crawling on the flowers, the vase, and now, the counter. So my first thought is that somehow these baby mantises were in the tulips when I bought them & they are just now coming out. Great, I thought, now I will have to throw the flowers out. I hate throwing flowers out. I usually wait until they are drooped over the side of the vase & the petals are all over the table before I throw them out. Well, I couldn't bear to throw out perfectly good tulips, so I demolished the baby mantises and put the vase back on the table. (At which point I discovered a few more of the tiny bugs on the bowl on the table.)

Later, we were eating dinner at the table (which almost never happens), and we discovered a couple more mantises. One on the bowl, a couple on the vase. Good grief, these things are every where. Well, about 5 minutes into our dinner, Baron looks at me & says "Don't look up." Oh my goodness...never say that to a female. He scares the crap out of me when he says that. I said "What? What is it? You're scaring me!" He told me they were on the ceiling. And when he said "they", I knew exactly what he meant.



Bugs on ceilings scare me. I guess since I can't crawl on the ceiling, I doubt their powers to do so. But I looked up anyway. Wow. There were probably 7 or 8 baby praying mantises on our ceiling. Is this a horror show? Is our home being overcome by praying mantises? I could just see them growing overnight into huge monstrous creatures that devour our flesh while we sleep. They would come crawling up out of the floor furnace from the crawl space beneath the house. The would crawl out of the fireplace, and through the open bathroom window. It was a living nightmare.

Needless to say, Baron captured the bugs and we finished our dinner in peace. I'm sure we didn't get all of the little buggers, but I can rest assured that at least 21 of them are gone for good.



Learn about the praying mantis