It's no joke that commercial chicken feed has nearly doubled in price in the last 2 years alone. Even with all the garden and house scraps, the cost of raising meat birds and laying hens is almost making it too expensive to bother with. I've read that chickens, especially those in pens, love japanese beetles and with the damage they have cause on my raspberry plants in just a few days since they have emerged for the year I am all too happy to watch the chickens devour them. Here is a trap we rigged up to capture the beetles for our chickens and ducks. We placed one directly in the chicken pen where they just fall into a shallow rubber feed pan filled with a few inches of water. A second one that is closer to our raspberries, they fall into a 5 gallon bucket that also has a few inches of water in. The goal when placing near a heavily infested area is to get close enough to draw them away from the plants u want to protect or you end up attracting more. The five gallon bucket style one needs to be dumped a few times a day or there gets to be so many that they climb on each other and start flying back out. We seem to be catching an enormous amount. I am hoping between the japanese beetles, duck weed, and garden produce that maybe for at least 2 months we won't have to buy food. Someone suggested freezing them for use at other months, but I just don't think I can stomach bags of dead beetles in my freezers, even an old one devoted to that.
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