Hot Weather At Last

After a couple of months of clouds and almost daily rain the clear skies and blazing sunshine is a bit of a shock. The snow is melting fast from the mountains. The sunshine is too much for me and I have to stay indoors for about five hours during the worst of it. Here at the latitude of 43ºS the sun has bite, especially as the country air has only occasional pollution.

Yesterday I rigged up new shade cloth in the greenhouse. It took me quite a while and the heat really got to me. Today I didn’t last long in there so I’m not much further ahead in my plans for planting. There’s plenty to keep me busy indoors.


Mantis Diary 7- Parasite?

Today I was checking the unhatched egg cases and found two partially hatched, but with small wasps on them. At first I thought they were ants, but on enlarging an image of them I could see that they were wasps. At least two had long ovipositors. See extra shot. There are small wasps that parasitise praying mantis ootheca by laying their eggs deep into each chamber. The baby wasps hatch and eat the mantis nymph inside. I wonder if that is what has been going on here.