Woman's Christmas Tree Infests Her House With Bugs

Dec 05, 2019

A real Christmas tree is a status symbol, for sure. The fresh pine scent is so nostalgic, and there's nothing like hanging up decorations among bright green needles. However, there's some drawbacks to having a living tree in your home!

It's only natural that a live tree could have live critters living on it, according to Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. But it's not often you get a case this bad. Molly Kreuze enjoyed a traditional Christmas in Virginia. After the festivities, she went to toss her tree. That's when she realized something was terribly wrong.

"Bugs," Kreuze told ABC 7. A whole family of praying mantises, to be exact. They hatched from brown egg sacs on the tree and made themselves right at home.

Each of these egg sacs contain up to 400 mantis eggs. Just imagine how many little baby mantises Kreuze had crawling around her home! She collected over a hundred of them alone.

You might think that's all she wrote for the unlucky critters. Luckily for these intrepid insects, Kreuze is a veterinarian and knows how useful praying mantises can be. "They eat other bugs," she explained. "People use them for organic gardening."

Unfortunately, there's no gardening in the winter in Virginia, so Kreuze had to sit tight with her baby bugs while she looked to rehome them.

How can you avoid your own insect infestation? For starters, you could try an artificial tree this year.

Artificial trees are a great way to showcase your creativity, coming in every color you could imagine. They also help you save money, as long as you have the space to store the tree year to year.

But if you simply must have a real, live tree, you can reduce your risk with a couple extra steps.

First, give that tree a good, solid shake or two before you bring it indoors. That will unseat any sleeping bugs or spiders and detach larger egg sacs. Next, search the branches for strange clumps in varying shades of white and beige. These are usually egg sacs for different insect species. They can really blend in, so be careful! For example, mantis egg sacs are brown and shaped like walnuts. They're easy to miss if you don't know what you're looking for. If you find an egg sac, cut off the branch it's attached to and leave it outside. A warm home will have those bugs waking up early. If they stay outside, they'll snooze until spring.

Don't let your friends and family become caretakers for a family of crawling critters! Spread the word about these simple precautions. And maybe you have a fun Christmas tree story of your own. We'd love to hear it!