Coronavirus, Covid 19 Discussion and How It Has Affected Your Daily Life Chat Thread

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I thought I'd share a quote by John F Kennedy.

"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."

I think it was a reference to the French Revolution when thousands of aristocrats were beheaded, and the rest jailed when people had enough.

Does that sound like Lebanon and Belarus?
 
OK since many on this thread are of a crafty sort, is anyone familiar with silkworm farming?

I have a plethora of mulberry trees that I'm about to take down. Many years ago I used to participate in Sustainable Living Backyard Tours. A visitor was a silkworm farmer and wanted to buy branches, leaves and small trees from me but we never made a deal.
I still have those trees and many more. I just want to find a use for them before I kill a bunch of them.
 
Not in the slightest. They only eat immobile/dead tissue, making them less dangerous than your average biting housefly maggot. But they eat fresh meat as their primary diet. They're very commonly used to clean bones and other parts for taxidermy.

Aside from having a bit of a smell (they smell like a bug colony, not like dead things, crickets smell the same way) they're actually extremely pleasant to own. They live in puffy white cotton batting that they dig holes through. The adults are small, shiny and black with tiny white spots. They CAN fly, but they never do. The larvae are tiny to moderately sized and fuzzy/soft like tiny grey caterpillars. They move like a caterpillar too, with that same rolling motion and the fuzz on them makes it obvious.

We feed them a little bit of whatever meat we're eating before we season/cook it, or we let them clean fresh bones when we process animals.

The only risk of keeping them is if they escape and you have a lot of organic matter lying around they could eat it and make a little wild colony. But because they're so immobile that's not a big risk. We just keep their cage screened and are careful handling the bones when we take them out to make sure there's not live beetles or larvae that can escape.



:O A domestic rabbit. They look a little more tame when they're just the tops sitting out, or from younger rabbits, but this was a sub adult, about 5 months. The lower jaw really changes the presentation and the way it's floating like that is really cool.
I've done quite a few European mounts of whitetail deer heads. I do what I can with them and hang them from a nail in my garage. Every time they get dermestid beetles. Not sure where they come from or how they find the heads, but pretty neat knowing people pay for those little bugs.
 
Tough gigs.

How do you feel about Gov. Kristi Noem's fight with the tribes' attempt to keep themselves safe from Covid 19?

Thanks for posting your story anyway. That was the original intention of this thread.
I feel that if the BIA would’ve acted on taking down the checkpoints they would not be here anymore. I respect Gov Kristi Noem and wish she would’ve been able to take them down!!
we do havewhat they call the six mile stretch from the railroad, that nobody owns and we live on that six mile stretch! Nobody thinks or knows much about that!
She’ll get it done, the tribe is thinking they’re going to put up toll booths, I’m not sure how they can legally do that beings how the state road crew do the maintenance! I wouldn’t want the tribe to maintain the highways.
 
OK since many on this thread are of a crafty sort, is anyone familiar with silkworm farming?

I have a plethora of mulberry trees that I'm about to take down. Many years ago I used to participate in Sustainable Living Backyard Tours. A visitor was a silkworm farmer and wanted to buy branches, leaves and small trees from me but we never made a deal.
I still have those trees and many more. I just want to find a use for them before I kill a bunch of them.

I don't know anything about silkworms (except that they're notoriously a pain to raise/harvest) but I do know that mulberry is great. You can make tea out of it and it's a wonderful snack for animals, especially rabbits.

I've done quite a few European mounts of whitetail deer heads. I do what I can with them and hang them from a nail in my garage. Every time they get dermestid beetles. Not sure where they come from or how they find the heads, but pretty neat knowing people pay for those little bugs.

Some dermestid species do better in captivity than others. Most of the ones you see in the wild are specialized local species that don't do well in captivity. If I tried to hang anything like that in my garage I'd just be producing biting black fly maggots. :T Then they'd lay their icky eggs in my rabbits bedding and their maggots would try to burrow into my bunnies and give them flystrike. Not great.
We bought a disease free and captivity friendly colony for cleaning bones and they're doing great. :) I say "we" but it was my birthday present from G. It was honestly the last thing I expected him to get me - he hates buying me living things. It's been a really exciting hobby and I love them. I think they're very cute. G thinks they're gross.
 
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