Throw Away Your Christmas Tree If You Spot These Walnut-Shaped Lumps

Picking out the Christmas tree is one of my favorite holiday traditions. My family, we skip going to Walmart (nothing at all against Walmart) or a grocery store to get ours and go straight to a Christmas tree farm in Kilgore. The best part - you get to cut it down yourself! Once you get your tree to the front of the farm, it's shaken and blown before being wrapped up for you to take home.

Don't get annoyed by the time it takes to do that last part because it keeps you from potentially experiencing what this article is about...and trust me, you don't want this in your house.

I need you to look out for walnut-shaped lumps. It may seem harmless, or a little extra "detail" to your Christmas tree. It's NOT. This little walnut could be a praying mantis nest containing hundreds of these creepy crawly bugs. Leaving the nest unattended could leave these things to hatch in your home and roam free.

That's terrifying.

I don't do bugs at all, so much inside my home.

According to Mirror UK, the temperature inside our homes could speed up the time it takes to hatch the eggs. This means that your living, and eventually your entire home, could be crawling with bugs if you don't spot it first.

You can also clip the branch that you see this little lump on - but for me the ENTIRE tree is going out to the curb.

This Facebook post by Daniel Reed is being re-shared all over social media to serve as a warning for this very problem. Reed writes:

If you happen to see a walnut sized/shaped egg mass on your Christmas tree, don’t fret, clip the branch and put it in your garden. These are 100-200 preying mantis eggs!

"We had two egg masses on our tree this year. Don’t bring them inside they will hatch and starve!

His post has now been shared over 181,000 times.

In response to the Facebook post, one person wrote: "If I start seeing things crawling across the floor I will be gone until after Christmas."

Another person said: "Pretty sure I’ve seen these and mistaken them for pinecones"

Now you know!