Will chickens help control STINK BUGS!!!!

[WVDan44]

Does anybody know if chickens will eat stink bugs? Here in the Mid-Atlantic area, we have a plague of them in Spring and again starting about this time of year. All winter they creep out of the woodwork around the windows inside my house. I hate them. Now they are an epidemic in my garden. Please tell me that chickens will eat them.

 

[chkinut]

well, i only have 5 girls, and minimal stink bugs here. and my girls are pretty young (19 weeks) so no experience with them on that yet. However, i remember when i was a teen and we had chickens, i had a couple pets and one of my them ate a stink bug. her beak was opened and her breath smelled like.....well, a stink bug. i'm thinking she tried it and didn't like it. but i'm 42 years old...so this was awhile ago! hope someone else has more advice.

 

[sheaviance1]

I don't know about stink bugs, but mine won't touch the "squash bug" that eats my zucchini every year

 

[Chicken Boo]

Mine do not seem to be interested in stink bugs or squash bugs, dang it.

 

[Tiss]

Mine won't go near stink bugs.

 

[teach1rusl]

Mine don't touch them either

I've even held out a small pumpkin from my garden with the little sh*ts crawling all over, and they wanted nothing to do with them...

 

[Gallo del Cielo]

Stink bugs exude a compound (cyanide based) that is distasteful to most things and stinky. It is their principle anti-predator mechanism and, as you can see, highly effective.

 

[ColCty]

The stink bugs are starting to crawl on the outside (and sometimes inside) of our house, so i decided to see if our girls had any interest. Oddly enough, the brown hens gobble them down w/o hesitation while the white hens didn't seem very interested. Maybe they will get indigestion and will think twice next time, but today I must've fed them a couple dozen and they were just as hungry for last ones as the first ones.

I have to wonder if they'd give our eggs a funny taste if I feed them too many. Though I notice from the wiki that they are edible...ewwww...


From the wiki:

Known as jumiles, chumiles, chinche de monte, or xotlinilli, various stink bugs are part of Mexican cuisine. Known as bọ xít in Vietnamese, stink bugs are also found in Vietnamese cuisine.[citation needed] They are also commonly eaten in Laos, and are regarded as delicious due to their extremely strong odor.

 

[secuono]

No.

I have 70 chickens and I have at least 30 bugs on each window. Keep your windows closed, get bug spray and spray em dead from the outside.

 

[maizy'smom]

This is very depressing. Part of the reason I got chickens was for insect control. Over the last three years or so, I have spent less and less time in my garden because of the mosquitos. I am a mosquito magnet. If there is one in a 50 mile radius in the dead of January, it will find me! (And leave my DH completely unscathed!) So far, it seems the only yummy bugs my girls go ga-ga for are cicadas. No stink bugs. No s$%#@^&* mosquitos. Just cicadas. Though it does make for a very entertaining game of keep-away!

mm