Last year I had a big praying mantis on a little fruit tree and I would regularly go over and try to feed it bugs; caterpillars, things I found eating some of the plants in my garden. When I first started, it would scurry around to the other side of the trunk and I would put the bug on the trunk and walk away trying to keep an eye on what it did and it started over some weeks scurrying back around fairly quickly and grabbing whatever I had put down.
As the weeks progressed, it didn’t run around to the other side of the tree as much. Finally it didn’t run at all and I would hold the bug out wiggling between my fingers and it would take the item from my fingers. It got colder as the year got into November and while it survived several freezing nights, it finally disappeared. I had found one of the egg cases that it had laid but months after it disappeared I found a second egg case. And last night, in April they hatched. I found the frayed egg case :-) I also discovered three of them and got some pictures of this one.
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