The girls love their bugs! One of their favorite treats is the mealworm which, according to this website, is the larvae stage of the Darkling Beetle or Tenebrio Beetle. Not my cup of tea, but that's unimportant; it's what the girls want that matters. Seems many poultry keepers raise their own mealworms to feed their chickens. This blogger's post, Raising Meal Worms 101, has a lot of information about raising the little buggers.
Now, I don't know that I'll be raising worms any time soon, but one never knows. From Googling for general information about mealworms, the internet informs me that there was a mealworm shortage (!) a couple of years back. Still, there's just something about actively raising worms that kind of skeeves me out...at present. It seems I'm making my way down a slippery slope into 'back to basic' type activities, hobbies, lifestyle, etc. so I won't rule it out entirely. It might become palatable to me some day.
Here are some tender, juicy looking worms about to meet their end in our hens' innards:
Blech. But to each his own; here the girls are feasting on the worms:
The chickens are almost always fun to watch as they go about their business. They're especially fun to watch when they get something tasty to eat. They grab their worm and run away from the others to eat it. Then they dash back to look for another worm. If there aren't any more worms, one chicken will run after a chicken that got a worm to try and get it away from them. That doesn't often work; they're usually much too quick at snarfing down those bad boys.
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