YELLOW JACKETS AND BLACK SOLDIER FLY LARVAE
10/8/2015
(Lydia for Dilara) A few months ago I bought a bag of scratch grain for the chickens. I keep their food in a big plastic rubbermaid container that is kind of like a footlocker. I bought it at the thrift store for $5.
Soon I noticed that something was eating the scratch grain. I had an insect infestation! I found black soldier fly larvae. I thought the chickens might like to eat them. Chickens love to eat bugs! I scooped up a mixture of scratch grain and black soldier fly larvae and the chickens loved the bugs and didn't seem to care much about the grain.
Elsa Snowflake, our white chicken, loves the black soldier fly larvae better than the other chickens and she tries to eat as many as quickly as she can before the other chickens eat them!
When we first got chickens, we went to the Aquatic Critter and got some mealworms and superworms. I think they are pretty gross. I was surprised when the man at the store stuck his bare hand in the bin and scooped them up! I looked for some information online and watched some videos of different ways people grew mealworms. A lot of chicken owners feed mealworms to their chickens, and you can buy freeze-dried ones as treats. I think if I were a chicken, I might like to eat live mealworms, but maybe the freeze dried ones are like potato chips for chickens! It would be interesting to offer both at the same time to see if they showed a preference.
Anyway, I decided that growing mealworms was too much trouble and I gave up. It was after I had been trying to raise mealworms that I found the soldier fly larvae. I really like that they are growing themselves! I don't know how they got there, but they seem happy and are multiplying and I have not done any work at all to help them thrive.
I noticed one day when it was cold that it was harder to find them. I thought that maybe they went to the middle to stay warmer. I am wondering if I should bring them in the garage for the winter. I will have to look that up. I am sure the chickens would like to get their tasty treats all the year around!
Today, when I opened the bag, there seemed to be a lot right on the top. I had the top of the bag folded and pressed down. I think maybe they like feeling "tucked in" and they are not usually right on top if the bad is not folded down and pressed against the surface of the grain.
I easily scooped up DOZENS of squirmy soldier fly larvae. As I walked to the chicken coop, I got stung on my arm by some bug. Then I got another sting! Then another! I did not see what had stung me, but I thought they felt like yellow jacket stings. They really hurt! I dumped out the larvae for the chickens and as I walked back to the bin that held the chicken food, I was surprised to see that hundreds and hundreds of bugs were SWARMING around the chicken feed. I have layer pellets and the scratch grain/black soldier fly larvae in the same bag.
I decided that they must be yellow jackets. I remembered reading that they are carnivorous insects. I never thought that they might be attracted to my black soldier fly larvae! I was amazed at how quickly so many yellow jackets found the food source. There were "popping" noises from where the yellow jackets flew against the plastic bag that held the scratch grain and larvae.
I did not want to get too close! I think I remember reading that when a yellow jacket stings you, it leaves a smell that makes other yellow jackets find you and want to sting you, too! Dilara got stung 3 years ago, I think. We have had a nest of yellow jackets in our yard every year since then.
I was curious about the yellow jackets and I called the entomologist at the Agricultural Extension Office. He was a very nice man. He told me that yellow jackets probably would eat black soldier fly larvae, but that they prefer soft-bodied insects like caterpillars.
The 3 stings on my arm are hurting me very much! It has been about one hour since I was stung and I just measured one of the swollen places around one of the stings and it is 3 1/2 inches across! Two of them are very large and one is smaller. The big ones are very red and hot now. There spots are not only wide, they are large lumps under my skin!
The entomologist told me that it sounded like the yellow jacket loved the black soldier fly larvae even more than the chickens do! I really don't like yellow jackets at all. I think maybe they are good for something, but I can't remember what they do besides sting!
I have always had a very hard time killing yellow jacket swarms. They are sometimes called "ground bees" and they are a wasp, not a bee. They nest in the ground. The entomologist told me that every winter, all the yellow jackets in the colony die, except the queen. It would be interesting to read about them again, but I am not in the mood right now.
The entomologist said that Sevin Dust will kill the entire colony, including the queen, in 2 days. He told me to watch to see where they go late this afternoon. They all go to the nest to sleep at night. He said that all you have to do is sprinkle some Sevin Dust around the opening and the yellow jackets will walk through it and it will stick to them and they will take it all through the nest and they will all die. I do not like using Sevin Dust, because I like to use organic insecticides. I feel like Sevin is too poisonous, but it is popular. I think one year I got very frustrated with some bugs that were out of control, and I might have used a little Sevin because I wanted to kill those bad bugs, whatever it took!
I think that using some Sevin to kill these yellow jackets would be better than some things people do to try to kill them. Some people pour gasoline into the holes. Most wasp sprays do not seem to work, but I did get a foam type that killed them one year. I think most people agree that a yellow jacket nest is not something you want to keep in your yard!
Feb. 24, 2014 (we found a wooly bear caterpillar hibernating in the Earthbox I was taking old strawberry plants out of.--Lydia)
http://www3.islandtelecom.com/~oehlkew/spisabel.htm
http://www.almanac.com/content/predicting-winter-weather-woolly-bear-caterpillars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrharctia_isabella
http://www.mynatureapps.com/2012/11/observing-the-woolly-bear/
http://www3.islandtelecom.com/~oehlkew/spisabel.htm
http://www.almanac.com/content/predicting-winter-weather-woolly-bear-caterpillars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrharctia_isabella
http://www.mynatureapps.com/2012/11/observing-the-woolly-bear/
March 12, 2014 (Just discovered it is in the cocoon! We were putting new parsley in the jar and lo and behold, there wasn't just a caterpillar sitting on the stick....it was a fuzzy cocoon!-Lydia)
Dilara: "Once upon a time there was a caterpillar.And then he had a cocoon and it was sticking to the glass, and then it turned into a Tiger Moth and then they let it go and then it flew away."
Dilara: "Once upon a time there was a caterpillar.And then he had a cocoon and it was sticking to the glass, and then it turned into a Tiger Moth and then they let it go and then it flew away."
April 3, 2014 (Lydia--Well, we were gone all day yesterday. Last night around 11 there seemed to be some flying insect that was annoying me. This morning we checked on the caterpillar and the foil top was off the jar and there was a pretty large hole in the top of the cocoon. Darn. I don't know if the cat knocked the foil off the top of the jar, letting the moth out. Would a moth be strong enough to push it off itself? I guess there is a chance that the moth will turn up in the house somewhere. We are disappointed. Dilara wants to know if cats eat moths. I think they might. We will try again with another caterpillar or butterfly. A summer or 2 ago, we observed a swallowtail larva that was living on our parsley plant. I tried to keep it protected from birds. We have several flowers and plants that are attractive to butterflies, and we will plant more this year. I think we will also provide a shallow dish of water with stones or sand for the butterflies to drink from. Here is a great site about butterfly gardening: http://www.thebutterflysite.com/gardening.shtml)
July 16, 2014. Dilara thought there were bees swarming around in the yard yesterday, but I think they may have been junebugs. We can do unit study on them.
Here's some ideas
http://voices.yahoo.com/june-bug-lesson-plan-ideas-pre-k-teachers-12006084.html?cat=7
Tie into MUSIC with Dolly Parton's "In My Tennessee Mountain Home" (junebugs on a string)
Not sure this is the best site, but we have to tie the junebug to beetles in general and scarabs in particular and their importance in Ancient Egypt and we can work in a little social studies (history, geography) in that way http://www.zarifas.com/egyptian_scarab.shtml
http://www.crayola.com/lesson-plans/
Here's some ideas
http://voices.yahoo.com/june-bug-lesson-plan-ideas-pre-k-teachers-12006084.html?cat=7
Tie into MUSIC with Dolly Parton's "In My Tennessee Mountain Home" (junebugs on a string)
Not sure this is the best site, but we have to tie the junebug to beetles in general and scarabs in particular and their importance in Ancient Egypt and we can work in a little social studies (history, geography) in that way http://www.zarifas.com/egyptian_scarab.shtml
http://www.crayola.com/lesson-plans/