My chickens are good at many things. Laying eggs is the obvious one. Being down right adorable is another. The 3rd, and less often praised talent that my chooks posses, is as pest controllers. On more than one occasion, I’ve watched a chook grab a beetle larvae or a moth that would otherwise have invaded one of my bee colonies. You go girls!
Scratching and foraging for beetles is okay, as far as it goes, but enjoying a beetle feast soaked in vegetable oil is more to their liking. My chooks are nothing if not connoisseurs and I am their favourite chef.
small hive beetle on comb
beetle trap hanging on top of frames
Every time I inspect my beehives I empty the beetle traps. I dump the small hive beetles that drown in the traps on two little posts in the retaining wall in my garden. I use veggie oil from my kitchen in the traps so bees (and chickens) don’t have any nasties to deal with. After being dumped, the beetles magically vanish into thin air. I used to wonder what happened to them. Now I know.
Here are my girls enjoying a free lunch.
Like I said, adorable!
Laura Rittenhouse's Gardening Journal 
I am always looking for new ways to improve pest management; I will store this information for later use…thank you.
Yeah, it’s funny how the pest management aspect of chickens is so often not mentioned. I guess because to get the real benefits of their talent, you really need to let them run through your vegetable patch eating caterpillars – at which time they eat all your vegetables. A major flaw in their design, I’d say 🙂
Clever girls! They don’t miss a trick. Isn’t it wonderful how it all works?
I was nervous in the beginning about how the chickens and bees would interact. Would the chickens eat the bees (people have told me they would) would the bees attack the chickens (why wouldn’t they) and so on – turns out they ignore each other while the chickens waddle around the hives looking for those tasty beetle larvae (a real treat with plenty of protein-goodness). They are all clever, chickens and bees alike, and live in harmony – there’s a moral in there somewhere.
I had those concerns as well, and have the same outcome. They just ignore each other. 🙂
I can handle them ignoring each other but I’m none too pleased if they ignore me. Luckily my chooks do tend to follow me around as if they really do like me – the bees are another matter entirely!
Keeping chickens and bees seems to go really well together!
They do. I love that my “pets” get along so well. It would have been horrible if there’d been conflict.
So great! And way too adorable.
Yeah, who wouldn’t love chooks?