Huh. Ngl, that’s super weird, but I’m sorry that’s your experience, because this harmony thing I’ve got going on is pretty sweet, and I wish it for everyone. Tho the random bumblebee that finds her way to my living room 2-3x/yr perplexes me…

So fun story about symbiotic living, because why not :)

I inherited birds when my mom died. I did not want them, I hated having them, because it felt very wrong. She got them as hatchlings and neglected them like she did her kids for the three years she had them. But I took them in and tried to hand train them, at least take good care and all, got them a huge flight cage, three times the size they had, did my best. I did eventually, after getting them comfortable interacting with hands, surrender them to a rescue because they were only 8, I have no experience raising, training, or handling birds, and conures live up to 35. Frankly I get too many migraines to have parrot sex happen in my home for another 20+ years. IYKYK.

When you have birds, you almost always have pantry moths. And then you have them forever. And they get bad. Toss everything and start over bad.

So I wisely thought I’ll get a praying mantis ooth (only a three pack??? They only have 500-1500 eggs each, why not. What’s the worst that could happen?) and hatch them, then release most of them since they are “introduced native” to my area, and let the rest go in the jungle of my living room plants, and see what happened.

Well… they hatched, and the hatchery tank wasn’t secure enough so half escaped right away, to be eaten by spiders, cats, or just each other. The other half I mostly threw outside, kept about 100 and let them go in my living room plants. Praying mantises of this species can’t fly until their fifth molt, and only if female, so I had time.

Not my best idea. Eventually there was just one left, and I took it outside.

But then I found trichogramma wasps purely by chance in some random large scale farming blog about pest control (circa 2012) while definitely searching for exactly that sort of solution, and they actually did a great job clearing out the moths. I know that sounds like bullshit, given the story above, but this whole thing is 100% true and I’m not releasing dangerous or creepy wasps into my home, even if mantids were fine. They are stingless obligatory parasites, they lay their eggs in the moth eggs, the larva eats the egg and hatches already fertile to implant more eggs. They are one of the smallest winged insects known to man, roughly the size of a grain of sand, and when the host species dies off in an area, so do they. When released outdoors they can supposedly reduce a moth or other target species infestation by 95%, so imagine the potential inside!! They are all female and hatch with fertilized eggs ready to be laid, interestingly, because they harbor a specific gut bacteria that makes them all self-fertile and female. When given antibiotics they -spontaneously produce males!!!- how cool is that???

I released 15000 of them every month (about three inch square of eggs) during summer months for two years, because they have a relatively long reproductive cycle, and they couldn’t be shipped in winter. My moth problem went away while I still had the birds. It was amazing.

So now every time I hear about people who have birds I tell them about it, and I bought them for a year for the rescue I gave mine to, and they were thrilled to get rid of the problem. Because nature already figured it out :)

And I’m a super gigantic huge nerd now for bio solutions to common issues we use chemicals for! And biomimicry! Amazing!

Totally not bullshit proof citation: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichogramma