Previous years the beetles decimated my raspberries, and ate the flowers off dad’s magnolia. This year I’ve seen maybe 2.
There are 2 likely possibilities for why they aren’t as bad this year. I’m hoping it’s because I had chickens out eating the grubs before they could grow up. JB grubs were my chickens’ first “live” food, and they still go crazy over them.
But it’s also possible that the weird spring weather interrupted their cycle. We had a late spring freeze that just hung around. It did a number on the songbird population, local news was asking people to put out mealworms because of how many robins were starving to death.
We lost all of our chickens to coons and foxes and a couple of other varmints. Chickens are great bug sweepers but we just have too many varmints. I killed 13 coons one year. I’ve given up on chickens because they become pets and my wife doesn’t want to withstand the loss of so many pets.