Cool! I love praying mantises! I would cover them just in case before you use the oil. Those are great! I have them in my yard also.

Oh, John I am envious. Where are you located? Must be somewhere warm.

You don't have those up there Vladimir? I guess I'm a bit south of you, but we have lots of them! I had a huge one this year that stationed himself on a flowering limequat and ate the bumblers that came to the flowers. We would find the wings...sad, but he/she had to eat too!

Vladimir, I'm in SE Texas so, yes, plenty warm for the preying mantises. We just hit our low of 43F this week.

Laura, your preying mantis was eating bumblebees?? I'm really impressed!

This is one of the beneficials that might take a hit from my dormant oil treatments but it sure knocked out my wax scale problem. I will be sure and cover the eggs if I do a fall treatment this year.

Now that's great! Your plants look fantastic too! I have bookoos of leaf miners so the leaves that come on during the leaf miner's peak period all look rough, and then the whiteflies during the summer poop all over the leaves and they turn dark with mold that likes the sweet whitefly poop. Isn't life great!

I'm trying a new approach on the leaf miners this year. They really do a lot of damage to new growth on my newly planted trees and those are the very trees that need to get the most benefit of the few leaves they have. Beginning earlier this week, I'm spraying Spinosad on the young leaves of plants that are too young to bloom. Spinosad kills honeybees so I'm not treating my more mature plants. The mature trees have lots of leaves anyway so it's the young ones I want to give an edge.