My Love Affair With Ducks...

[Angileen]

I still have the scars on my lower legs from 2008! - If humanity ever settles on other worlds in space, there is (at least) one species we should leave behind under all circumstances…
No ants visible in this video, but still scary:

Don't have fire ants where I live. But the mosquitos can carry you away. Some summers are so bad I run screaming and yelling from my vegetable garden all while choking on a mouth full of the rotten no good for nothing pests! My sister in law is from Mississippi, she used to say they had bad mosquitos, went there for a visit when she and my brother still lived there and never noticed 1 mosquito. Don't know if there was any or if they were so much smaller than here in Minnesota that I didn't notice them. I live in a rural community by a river and have a pond so I know what mosquito hell can be. People who live in cities have no clue.

 

[WannaBeHillBilly]

This made me remember something. These ducks are making me feel terrible. You would think they are starving. I want to give them something else to eat because of how they’re acting. You know, I feel kind of like the parent of a 40 lb/18 kg, three month old baby boy following the doctors’ instructions on feeding and all the old folks standing around saying feed that boy, he’s starving!

My ducklings had access to their duckling crumbles 24x7 from their first day on. After a while they just found their rhythm of eating, drinking, trying to escape the brooder, shooting poop at the walls and sleeping. All of them, except Blanca Duck. She must have too many Pekin genes and is always hungry. Duck heaven for Blanca is a huge pasture with soft, fresh green grass, where worms stick their heads out of their holes and wave to be eaten and moles making piles of pellets…

 

[Angileen]

I don't have quirks! - I am a quirk!

That happened to me once, but it was someone who spit their chew in the bottle, I think I win!!!

 

[WannaBeHillBilly]

I leave food out 24/7 for mine but am in the minority here. I find they eat less if it's always there as they snack around instead of falling on it like a ravaging horde. We save that for peas.

Agree!

 

[WannaBeHillBilly]

Local honey also is very good for someone suffering from allergies.

Untreated, also called raw honey is the best you can buy. But centrifuge-honey is the best at all: It may contain bits of bees, wax, pollen and plant material which is a challenge for your immune system and intestinal bacteria. If you survive that, even a beer-virus can't get you.
Needless to say that i was cleaning out my uncles honey centrifuge. First with a wooden spoon, then with my tongue and finally with boiling water…

 

[WannaBeHillBilly]

The Ortho brand Orthene does not kill the ants instantly. It allows them time to take the poison back to the queen before it kills. It does its job, but I prefer to watch them die. Yeah, I can be brutal.

I forgot to mention in an earlier post that when I was a kid I had several ant farms. They were so interesting, but they weren’t fire ants back then.

I still have that letter size fresnel lense i used to cook them alive… Plenty of hot sunshine in Houston and i turned it into a death-ray. Nothing is too brutal when it comes to fire-ants. Some people flood their nests with molten aluminum!

 

[Mimi13]

I need to get a floor scraper also. Right not I use a large putty knife to lift up the stuck on stuff that wont come up with the grain shovel.

On my chickens’ dropping boards I use either a 8” or 10” putty knife and/or a broken handled hoe to scrape the droppings.

 

[Mimi13]

There must be a beekeepers union that owns a few senators in WV...

That’s the way it is in Alabama too. We had to register with the state in order to have bees.

 

[Angileen]

Many people think they have allergies when in fact their bodies are just reacting normally to something they ate. Heavy farting after eating beans, kale, cabbage or onions is absolutely normal and not an allergic reaction for example.
You're right the "classic" allergies, like hay-fever are often caused by genetic inheritence, but all those new "allergies" have other reasons. A bit hard to read, but i'm referring to this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis#Overview
»David Strachan proposed that lower incidence of infection in early childhood could be an explanation for the rise in allergic diseases such as asthma and hay fever during the 20th century.«
For some people it is just "fancy" to have an allergy, maybe because they have nothing else to talk about. I have no known allergies, but if i eat beans even the ducks try to say upwind of me…

I have bad allergies never had them as a child. Took six Doctors to finally figure it out about 8 years ago. My allergy doctor said it was rare for someone to have as many and severe symptoms that I was having from my allergies. Dah! People can die from allergies. I now have to take one 24 hr allergy pill, nasal spray, inhalers, Montelukast, and 2 Benadryl 3 to 4 times a day. On occasion I have had to tale prednisone to relieve symptoms. You can become allergic to something if you are around it too much. I wish I had a simple running nose or watery eyes like most people get that is nothing compared to what happens. If I don't take my meds. I would be disabled. So if the Zombie apocalypse ever comes I need to make sure I am stocked up!

 

[WannaBeHillBilly]

Oh yes, these boogers have their food 24/7 and still act starved. I think it’s because I have dropped a few peas in the bathtub when they were swimming to watch them dive after them. Now they think that should be on their menu all the time.

Try meal-worms and they will hunt you down wherever you hide…