What’s up crew!!! Today I was gifted a couple praying mantis eggs for my tent. I couldn’t say no lol these are going to be awesome…. well I think hummm. My brother has them in his greenhouse they are like little pets. Should I feed them or just let them go in my tent when hatched to keep any bugs out?
No idea! But very keen to see how it goes!
I will keep you posted on them. Should hatch in a couple days
Praying Mantis are cool, however if there are no insects for them to eat, they will surely die. They’ll probably be okay for a little while because they will all start eating each other until only one is left. After that, it needs insects (which I don’t recommend on intentionally introducing to the grow)… and not just any old bug… after a month or so it’ll be too big to eat the things you really need to worry about in a grow room like mites, etc… It’ll want something bigger like crickets…
If you had an existing infestation, maybe *MAYBE* releasing an egg case (with potentially hundreds of mantis) could allow the small baby mantis to feed on mites, but eventually they will be too big to care about mites and will turn on each other.
Each year I put a mantis egg sack in my outdoor grow. I have an “enclosed” area surrounded by insect netting. I noticed (before introducing a mantis) that I would see moths in the top corner of the netting trying to fly free. Within weeks of introducing a mantis, I no longer found months and instead kept seeing moth wings on the ground. Good times!
#growerslove
Me and a room mate kept one he brought home from a garden center. We kept him in a fish tank that was empty and we would feed him cicada bugs. It was wild kingdom right in the living room!!!
so when they first hatch like 200 will pop. i have pics, its crazy. they all eat each other though. so you wont have to feed them for about the first month as they will kill each other anyways if there is food of not. do not hatch during flower cause the shear numbers means its inevitable they get stuck in your flower. once they are grown it doesn’t matter. mine fed on my rove beetles so i wasnt too stoked to have them around and when they died off i seen fungas gnats come back until the rove beetle population rebounded. other than that they eat fruit flies and small crickets. i think the rule of thumb is 1/3 of their body size or smaller. its fun to have them around. i often shared doobies with them. oh and they are territorial so they dont like to move very far. so once the first wave dissapates they typically wont leave your tent. i only ever found 1 guy who wandered.
They are cute and I don’t kick them out of the greenhouse if I see one. I think I would prolly use something else for eating bugs though. They don’t seem very fast at it. Cute though for sure!
I have been gardening outdoors for years, but this year was the first that I ever saw a praying mantis and it was my marijuana plants that attracted it. So happy about that!
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