Making Feed from Japanese Beetles

[Grub Digger]

This is fantastic! The more people trapping these suckers and feeding them to their chickens the better!

 

[JedJackson]

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.

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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.

What a fantastic project. It would be great if you found a way to convert them into feed because otherwise they would just go to waste. And who knows, you might start a trend that could make a dent in the JB population and maybe lead to less pesticide in the environment. Best of luck!

 

[centrarchid]

Here is how a scratch mix was presented with layer pellets and beetle pellets on ends. From top to bottom; pelleted layer feed, shell corn, oats, BOSS and beetle pellets. Not a proper experiment but birds did spend most effort pecking back and forth between BOSS and beetle pellets. I really think they can detect smells a lot better than they are give credit for.

 

[centrarchid]

I'd have to try a solar convection dehydrator. I saw a video of someone who designed one like this and he said that air flow is the key. Also he liked this top-down flow design because air flow pushed heat collecting at the top downwards.

I wonder what kind of poundage such a device could dry per run and what the range of run durations would be. Humidity part of the time will be problematic even with good air circulation and heat. I can see need for freezing a lot as beetles trapped followed by an extended period of drying later.

 

[Blue Tiger]

Oil (canola) is being used in part to suppress dust during early part of mixing phase. Beetles do not appear to be broken up as finely when soybean is reduced in its interity by wheat flour. This like inventing new breakfast cereals where milling issues and mouth feel are just as important as what product taste like and its nutritional value.

 

[centrarchid]

Some could be toxic, but certainly not all. I have had misfortune of eating a few riding a motorcylce through a swarm and a co-worker at a bunch to make a point. Ants, wasps, bee larvae and mayflies taste better.

The toxicity is likely to come from plants the adults consume while refueling. Elder Berries and Common Milkweed are both consumed and could be a source of nastiness.

I have about 60 juvenile chickens eating lots of beetles over the last few days. No losses nor obvious health issues.

 

[centrarchid]

I am not thinking about that because likely not relevant. Yes the beetles are largely coming from farm land, but from forage fields rather than row crop fields. Poisons that would be of concern to me will drop beetles before they reach my birds.

 

[centrarchid]

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.

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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.

See what I have bolded above. I think I am seeing a lot more consumed per bird than 50-100. Number not actually quantified. Same also get crop fill on feed in AM and PM where beetles dominate consumption during middle of day when beetles flying. It may take a couple for birds to acclimate the feeding regimen. Chicks in 4 to 5 week range I have may be eating the lower amount because the birds are smaller.

 

[centrarchid]

Today is a big day. We will be collecting about 5 lbs of very fresh Japanese Beetles from traps at out research farm. These will be analyzed for nutrient quality for comparison with similarly collected beetles in the second week of the season. In suspect the nutritional quality of the late season beetles will differ markedly from those early on. Beetles must be live and vigorous when they come into contact with the dry ice.

 

[Blue Tiger]

Table below show results of crude composition analysis. Amino acid profile, not reported below, is very good as typical of fish meals and other high end protein sources. The disparity between crude protein and total amino acids is dominated by the chitin which is largely the crude fiber component. Fat content of about 3% is only about 1/3 or what I would like as that would be the minimum required to enable lipid extraction using a cold oil press. Low lipid content will make storage of dry product less likely involve rancidity issue. Incorporating the Japanese Beetle biomass as a dried product into a scratch mix at a rate of about 30% will put protein levels and likely amino acid profile into a range suitable for chickens where final product will be closer to a complete diet minus calcium and likely some vitamins. Cool stuff found with carotenoids as well. Fatty acids not as good as I hoped, especially for use in fish feed, but likely very good for chickens.