Locusts

Locusts can be poisonous to animals that eat them. Locusts are fascinating animals that are easy to breed. To start with, you will require a wooden box cage with a glass front. Minimum dimensions should be about 60 cm (24 in) high X45 cm (18 in) wide X 30 cm (12 in) deep. There should be a light inside connected to a thermostat to maintain the temperature at about 32-34°C (90-93°F) during the day, dropping to about 28°C(82°F) at night, so there must be a thermometer in the cage to enable you to check this. It is important that the light bulb is not in a position where it can scorch the wood or you might end up with a fire, and I prefer to put a wire mesh cage around it so that the locusts cannot hurt themselves. You need a false floor about 13 cm (5in) above the bottom of the cage and you will have to make a few holes in this large enough to take a plastic tube – I like to use the top part of the type of budgerigar drinking fountain that fits on the bars of the cage. Drop the tubes, open end uppermost into the holes so that the top edge is flush with the false floor and fill them with rather moist sterilized sand. When they are full to the top, cover the whole floor with the same sand. You can sterilize the sand in the oven after you have rinsed it well several times. Some twigs with lots of branches should be set upright in the cage for the insects to climb. A shallow dish of bran and a small glass jar packed tightly with grass is all that is needed in the way of food. The grass stalks should be in water to keep them alive and the reason they are packed tightly is so that a locust cannot drown in the water. Only trial and error will tell you how much grass to use - too little and cannibalism will result; too much and the cage will get sweaty and smelly. The cage must in any case have a gauze ventilation panel.

One special point about the construction of the cage door. If you make a conventional door, some locusts will escape, so the door must be hinged at the top so that it swings inwards, and around the outside of the door frame fix securely one end of along leg from a pair of women's nylon tights. Cut off the foot so that you are left with a nylon mesh sleeve. Each time you insert your arm into this tube it fits snugly around your arm so that when you open the cage door no insect can possibly escape, but do make sure the tube is empty before you close the door and extract your arm.

The locusts will live through most of the year on the bran and the grass. Spray the grass with water before putting it in the cage. During the winter, when it may be difficult to find some nice appetizing grass, it can be replaced with sprouting wheat seeds on some damp cotton wool.

A cage of the suggested minimum size will house about 60 or70 adult locusts or up to a thousand newly hatched babies, which are called hoppers, but to start your colony you need only obtain one or two dozen adults. After they have mated the females lay their eggs in the deep tubes of sand. You can either leave the tubes where they are or remove them and stand them upright in a corner of the cage and replace them with new tubes in which case you will get more eggs. Humidity in the tubes is critical. If they are allowed to get too dry the eggs will become dehydrated and die, and if too wet a fungus will kill them. If you want to be sure of results and do the thing properly you should fill the tubes with 100parts sand to 15 parts distilled water and weigh them. Each day they should again be weighed and more distilled water added to make up any weight loss. Follow the same sort of procedure after eggs have been laid.

The little locusts hatch after four or five weeks and thereafter they shed their skins every so often, each time emerging a little larger. Each stage is called an in star, so newly hatched insects are known as first instars, and then second instars and so on. Do not be at all surprised when you start to lose the babies. Losses are high, sometimes as much as 80 per cent die before reaching maturity. Clean any bodies and other rubbish from the cage daily. At each stage the locusts are a valuable source of food for your animals, and obviously the larger the animal the larger the locust it will take. When you first start to keep locusts remember the reputation - you will be astonished at the amount they eat, but do not worry if a few escape; it is far too cold for the insects to survive for long in the open in Britain, so you are not going to wake one morning to find that the countryside has been defoliated overnight.