Here's my review/impression of the company "Insect Lore," of insectlore.com.

I've used this company two times. The first time, I ordered tiny caterpillars for a butterfly project I wanted to do with my children. No problems. It went great.

So this past spring, I decided to use them again. This time, it didn't go well at all. Here's what happened:


Wednesday, March 10, 2010: I receive the Insect Lore catalog in the mail. We decide to order the praying mantis kit- a "pagoda" and a live egg case. I place an order.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010: I get a delivery from Fed Ex. It's the praying mantis pagoda. I realize that I accidentally ordered the one that came with a COUPON for the live egg case, rather than the one that came with the actual live egg case. I send in the coupon with the additional payment (my fault!) and order the live egg case.

Friday, April 9, 2010: I receive the live egg case. We are home when it is delivered. It does not sit outside. We put the live egg case in the pagoda, and set the pagoda away from direct sunlight, not right near a window or draft, in the main living area of the house, on top of a small book case at the bottom of our staircase.

Friday, April 30, 2010: I wake up around 7 AM and go downstairs to find that instead of the live egg case sitting there as it has been every day for the past three weeks, there are a bunch of baby praying mantises moving all over the mesh! How exciting!

I email a few friends who are supposed to be taking some of these praying mantises off our hands, asking them if they can come by sometime this weekend to pick them up. This is because there are a lot of them, and we only have a very small yard and do not want to release them all at our house, and we only want to keep one or two for ourselves.

I go out for the day on a scheduled field trip, stopping at a pet store to buy tiny wingless fruit flies on my way home. By a few minutes after 5 PM that very day, we shake a bunch of the fruit flies into the mesh habitat for the praying mantises to eat. We watch for a while but don’t see any of them eating.

We periodically check back over the course of the rest of that evening, we still never see any of them eating.

Saturday, May 1, 2010: A friend comes over to take some of the praying mantises. We give her a good amount, but keep a lot of them, because there are a couple of other friends who want some, too, and who will be coming tomorrow to get them. We notice that at least some of them are dead. It is hard to tell how many because many of the others are just staying very still anyway. They're not moving around much like they were yesterday morning.

Sunday, May 2, 2010: This morning, I take a peek at the praying mantises, and it seems to me that if there are any left alive, it is very, very, few. I have to email the two people who are supposed to be coming over today to get some and tell them not to come.

A couple of hours later, I look again, and it is clear that every last one of them is dead. We don’t even have a single one left alive to “raise” as part of the project.

I am very disappointed. They started dying a day after they were hatched and finished dying two days after they were hatched. What a waste of money, and what a disappointment that we didn't get to follow through on our project.

I email Insect Lore, letting them know what happened and how disappointed I am. I am not rude in my email. I do expect that they will aim, in the interest of good customer service and customer satisfaction, to remedy this situation somehow.

Later, I get a reply from Insect Lore saying that I should have released all but one right after they hatched, that they don’t really get along and would eat each other or refuse to eat if they were kept together.

I email them back, protesting that their instructional materials state that they “suggest” we release all but one or two “within the first two days” of hatching (by the time two days were up, they were pretty much all dead already) and it said it was because “they need to forage for food” and might eat each other if they had nothing else to eat.

But they DID have other things to eat, they had a whole bunch of wingless fruit flies which had been put in the same day they hatched.

It was my position that if there was such an extreme danger of them all dropping dead after two days of being together, even with other food to eat, the instructions should be clearer and much more adamant about releasing them the very day they hatch.

There was no “We’re sorry, we’ll give you a refund, or we’ll ship you another live egg case, or we’ll give you a discount toward your next order” type of reply.

In fact, I never got another reply at all.

It's a shame. I would definitely have been a repeat customer. Now, I'll never order from that company again.

Their customer service is lousy.