Whether you call them "praying" mantis or "preying" mantis, one thing is for sure: they are difficult to find.

Tucked away in vegetation and as quiet as "the proverbial mouse" (except praying mantids are more quiet than the "proverbial" mice), they are an eye exercise in "Find me!"

As autumn approaches, our little bee garden is nearing the end of its life. The Mexican sunflower (Tithonia) and lavender are fading rapidly. However, honey bees and other pollinators continue to forage, and the mantids are still hungry. The female mantids, mothers to be, need more high-quality food. Ootheca!

We're all accustomed to seeing praying mantids grab their struggling prey with their spiked forelegs and munch away.  Usually that movement alerts us to their whereabouts.

But have you ever just searched for mantids in their habitat? See if you can find them in these photos.

Find the praying mantis! 

Sometimes in a world of towering skyscrapers, jumbo jets and warehouses big enough to hold a small planet--or at least a state the size of Rhode Island--we don't realize how “small” small is.

Last weekend it was a veritable insect feast on our narrowleafed milkweed. We saw lady beetles feeding on the oleander aphids, the oleander aphids sucking the very life out of the plant (plant juices) and monarch caterpillars polishing off the leaves.

Then the aphids started crawling on the ‘cats, and a whole new perspective of "small" burst into view.

An aphid, at about 1.5mm, is just a little larger than a pinhead. The lady beetle ranges from 0.3 to 0.4 inches (8 to 10 mm), while the monarch caterpillar, depending on the instar, is absolutely huge in comparison. Spell that H.U.G.E. According to MonarchWatch.org, the 1st instar is 2-6mm; 2nd instar, 6-9mm; 3rd instar, 10-14mm; 4th instar, 13-25mm; and 5th instar, 25-45mm.

With two handheld cameras (a Nikon D800 with a 105 macro lens and a Canon EOS 7D with an MPE 65mm lens), we managed to grab a few photos of a tiny aphid crawling on the caterpillar's head, body and tentacle.

That's how "small" small is.

Thank you, Mrs. Monarch.

Thank you for laying your eggs on our newly planted narrowleaf milkweed.

We planted the narrowleafed milkweed last spring, hoping we could coax you to come. We laid out a floral welcome mat for you with some of your favorite (adult) foods: a butterfly bush, Mexican sunflowers (Tithonia), and Lantana.

Then we watched.  And waited. And watched. And waited. 

We saw you nectaring the butterfly bush, the Tithonia and Lantana. We saw Gulf Fritillaries (Agraulis vanillae) chasing you. We saw territorial male sunflower bees (Melissodes aegilis) dive-bombing you. We saw female Valley carpenter bees trying to jerk you around.

You ignored our narrowleafed milkweed.  Not a good-enough host plant? Too many oleander aphids for you? Too many lady beetles eating the aphids?

We went from informal to formal. Please, Mrs. Danaus plexippus, lay your eggs on the Asclepias fascicularis. Please. Do. So. Now.

This week we saw your evidence: You did it! You gave us the most beautiful caterpillars we've ever seen. 

So, thank you, Mrs. Monarch.

And you, too, Mr. Monarch.

Please come again.

Yes, it happens.

We've heard the stories and read some of the scientific literature about what a female praying mantis will do to her partner during the mating process. Sexual cannibalism. She'll bite the head off of her mate and eat it--but the mating process continues unabated. (Except the male has lost his head )

We spotted a mating pair of mantids in our bee garden on Saturday. It was early evening, around 7. They were hidden among the long strands of English lavender.

My camera caught a quick shot of the pair. Yes, two heads. The next picture I took was of the male minus his head. He "lived"--that is, moved around, for about eight hours before expiring. Or, as Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, says: "It will live until it dries up."

Entomology Today weighed in on the sexual cannibalism behavior in its Dec. 22, 2013 edition.

"An urban legend about female praying mantises always eating males during or after mating has circulated for a long time. However, reality is much more complicated. 

"Kyle Hurley, an entomology student from the University of Central Arkansas, spent two years observing praying mantises in the lab and made some startling observations. For example, in one out of 45 cases the male actually consumed the female. And in one out of 45 cases, the female removed the head of the male before mating (the males were still able to finish the job)." 

Marianne Shockley Robinette, an entomologist at the University of Georgia, was quoted as saying in Entomology Today: "While it has been observed in artificial settings such as laboratories where they're rearing praying mantises, it's rarely been observed in a natural environment.”

Even Snopes, known for debunking urban legends, weighed in on this.

"Yes, the female praying mantis does sometimes eat her mate. In fact, male mantises will often offer themselves up as food to the female during the mating process, and from a biological standpoint this action makes sense: There's no point to mating with a female who might die from a lack of food before she can lay her eggs and pass the father's genes onto the next generation. This doesn't happen all the time, however, and its frequency of occurrence and the reasons for it are still a subject a debate within the entomological world."

The clincher is a YouTube video which clearly shows a female decapitating her mate. If this kind of thing makes you squeamish or queasy, you probably shouldn't watch it. (At least before breakfast.)

But yes, it happens. Nature is not always nice.