Making Feed from Japanese Beetles

[centrarchid]

These little buddies of many in the midwestern US do not need much of an introduction other than not much good can be said about them if you are interested in horticulture.

I am gearing up for an experiment that might be of interest to some. We spend a lot of effort trying to keep Japanese Beetles off blueberry and elderberry crops resulting in the capture of many hundreds of pounds of beetles. Catching them in mass is easy once you figure out how to trap them. We froze them in mass. Now we are experimenting in ways to make feed from them. First round involved simply feeding them out. Fish and chickens really like them but they are too bulky for storage and rot quickly. Second round involved running frozen beetles through a meat grinder. Fish and birds hammered them even better and the ground beetles could be stored in a much tighter space. The moisture is the problem preventing more economical long-term storage. We playing around now with drying the beetles out in a convection oven which is going to greatly improve shelf life. We preparing about 20 lbs of dried beetles for feeding out to fish and some will be sidelined to chickens. That going chickens will be mixed into a scratch to seriously increase protein levels. Should make the mix look pretty. Most the dried product will be subjected to milling to see how it compares to wet frozen product.

Care must be taken to control smells. We have already been run out of one building. After drying I think smells will be OK for most.

 

[RonP]

 

[centrarchid]

Trapping season is underway. Not protecting crops, rather after feed for animals. Doing a test run on traps.

 

[centrarchid]

Follow link provided by co-workers developing a mass trapping system.

https://ipm.missouri.edu/IPCM/2018/1/mass_trapping_japanese_beetles/

Volume they collect is much greater than the socks can muster. Several have been / will be setup just outside my lab. I really want the beetles fresh before harvesting as I am concerned about degradation of vitamins and fatty acids. An ammonia smell produced may be indicative of protein being mineralized. Rapid freezing promoted by beetles not being in too large a mass when placed in freezer. I suspect that as a group that can generate heat like a swarm of bees slowing chilling process.

 

[centrarchid]

We are preparing to make all kinds of good stuff from our 2018 Japanese Beetles harvest. A point that will be stressed is that we could have caught much, much more which will be done next year. We got just about 130 lbs based on live weight where the bulk was collected over only two days when we were just about getting biomass, but did not even have all the traps out yet. We could have collected a ton in about three weeks if we wanted with only about a dozen traps. Season was close to 6 weeks long.
We split this batch between two protein tubs and mixed in effort to get uniform mass.

Black, green. copper and red gold.

Coming out of meat grinder. We had to experiment a little to work out rate that would not bind grinder.

We packed it into 5-gallon buckets with lids. Some placed in plastic bags like used to store meat. All then placed into upright freezer.

Smell with these properly stored batches was likened to butter or of all things, ice cream. Out wheels are turning on what we can do to evaluate potential uses. We are still waiting on composition analysis report so we can formulate diets.

 

[centrarchid]

After 8 hours with 8 traps too close together we got nearly 60 lbs. Most flying beetles kept flying past traps. Two farthest traps had nearly a third of what we caught.

 

[RonP]

For years I have been actively trying to encourage insects inside my chicken run.

I have a Japanese beetle commercial trap, with sex pheromone and a floral scent, installed on a PVC pipe that extends above the run. The beetles slide, fly, drop, or crawl down the pipe where there is a hole at shoulder height to a chicken.

Works well midsummer. I actually wish there were more beetles...

 

[centrarchid]

Below is a rushed sequence of first effort to make pellets. The beetles represent about 1/2 of the mass on a dry weight basis. As shown they were simply frozen which does not smell bad like the batches we are drying. After drying it makes me think of Christmas cookies but others repelled. Formulation used more for fish (Bluegill) but should do fine as a scratch component. We added vitamins just to be safe. Amount made is roughly 2 pounds of pellets. We had to see how the beetles performed in the mixing process which differenced markedly from finer ground materials. Fish eat the stuff now but it will be dried overnight for chickens. Must be dried for long-term storage. This round is using a drying rack with a fan providing air movement. Humidity high in feed mixing room.


INGREDIENTS

MiXER

MIXING PROCESS

LOADING MEAT GRINDER TO SEE YOU IT BEHAVES AS A FUNCTION OF RATE

GRINDER OUTPUT WE THINK IS REALISTIC, SMELL NOT TOO BAD

DRYING RACK WITH 6 TIERS, ONLY ONE IN USE

BASE FORMULATION

BASE FORMULATION WITH A LITTLE GELATIN

Looks like what a skunk leaves behind after working on the front of a beehive.

 

[centrarchid]

Today we are doing something special. A student and I will be capturing beetles during a very narrow time window and freezing them in an ultra-cold (minus 80) freezer. The process with be repeated about 4 weeks later at tail end of Japanese Beetle season. Looking to so if nutritional quality varies with time within season. We may be breaking some laws as we scoot around the George Washington Carver Farm on Gators loaded down with beetle traps.


Trap placements should be appropriate to exceed capture rate and possibly yield realized last Saturday.

 

[Howard E]

Hmmmm.

Last year (2107), a neighbor and I attended the JB seminar at Lincoln U. Following that, we attempted a mass trapping program. It worked, but we couldn't find a use for all the beetles we caught. He had about 6 of the commercial traps and we were getting about 1/2 a 5 gallon bucket per day per trap. He estimated that over the course of the season, he caught at least 3 million beetles. I did about the same with the bag a bug traps. A chicken can only eat about 50 to 100 per day and then they are full. So consuming that many beetles fresh would take a lot of chickens!

So finding a way to save and process these would be a great benefit. The info in this thread is great stuff!

BTW, here are some of the trap mods we used. Starting with the simple Bag A Bug trap and how we modified it to catch more.



So the bugs crash into the panels and drop down into the funnel, down the pipe and into the bucket.

The pipe (3" PVC sewer pipe) can be longer......it can extend up into the tree canopy, and the bugs will still drop to the bottom.

The problem remains it only catches a small fraction. I tried some experiments with larger funnels.......have one I was going to use this year that was 2' in diameter to up the catch rate. Never got to use it.

A variation on this theme is to let the bugs drop into a small plastic wading pool with water, and bugs will float and chicks snag them that way. I've heard that ducks eat more than chickens, so this may work well for them. Assuming you have a few thousand ducks to feed!

Or hang the trap over the water and let them drop straight into the pond, lake or river. Problem still remains you may overwhelm the ability of the fish to eat them. They can only hold so many before they are full.

Would like to see this tried in a river where the fish population can swell to meet the need.