Mantis Mania

This is a true story, I am not making this up. I promise. For Christmas Grace received a Praying Mantis kit from dear Aunt Harriet and Uncle Billy. I finally remembered to send off for the egg case about a month ago. The egg case arrived along with a fruit fly culture and more jars so that I could assist the fruit flies in reproducing so that we could feed the baby mantises. All of these vials have been sitting on my piano for the last three weeks. I had it on my calendar to make more fruit flies yesterday. Well, guess what--the mantises hatched a full week early. AT LEAST 100 hungry baby mantises. They are quite cute but a little menacing. I opened the fruit fly vial only to find out that most of the 50,000 fruit flies had died. I managed to transfer about 20 of them into the new vial with fruit fly food--this was like the honeymoon suite for fruit flies. They were supposed to get friendly and reproduce--fast. I had AT LEAST 100 hungry baby mantises. The little book said that if they got too hungry they would start eating each other so we needed to separate these little guys and feed them. I decided we would keep 12 of them so today we separated out 12 and released the other 88 into the yard to fend for themselves. The kids have had a ball playing with them. Even Hannah has been holding them and carrying them around. Then came time to feed them. I figured I could give them each one or two fruit flies (they are supposed to get two a day) to stave off their hunger and hope and pray that my fruit flies would mate and have babies overnight. After feeding 11 of the mantises I realized that the rest of the fruit flies were dead! Uh Oh. Hungry babies, excited 7 year old, and no fruit flies. We collected a couple of tiny ants for the 12th mantis. I tried to collect fruit flies out of our compost bin--much easier said than done. It's next to impossible to "catch" a fruit fly without killing it. I was seriously getting stressed here and so I googled "flightless fruit fly" and found out that you can order them from a number of places including Petco. I thought if I could order them maybe I could also go buy them. I finally found a Petco with some in stock at the third store I called. We will be there in the morning! In the meantime Uncle Billy has come to our rescue and ordered a live culture of 50-100 fruit flies and this time they better like each other!!! Supposedly these fruit flies should keep producing more and more for at least 3-4 weeks. At that point the sweet mantises will be moving into the yard. I have taken some pictures but only have one to show you, I can't seem to get the others off my memory stick. Hopefully, I will get that worked out soon. In hindsight, if I had planned better I could have given away baby mantises to all you homeschooling buddies but I didn't plan better so our yard will just be full of baby mantises. If you want to come hunt them down you are welcome to.