wax_worm_futures

I worked for an insect farm for over a year. It was run by unremarkable capitalists of mediocre intelligence who wouldn't accept any assertion that there was room for improvement.

Because they failed so hard at growing a certain species of grub, we had to truck in our stock of that species from another company so we could resell it. They must have had pretty bad containment procedures because crickets got in with the grubs. But the crickets were fine in transit.

If they didn't, I'd have to revise my business model a bit.

Crickets are different from grasshoppers, they're in the same order but different families. Grasshoppers are the ones that turn into locusts.

Typically you can buy crickets from the Acheta or Gryllodes genus pretty easily, the ones for this prank probably cost around $70-100.

2 days ago I talked to a guy who said he just uses smooth plastic bottles for those roach traps, with some water inside and maybe something that smells like food.

A lot of online how-tos recommend the drop of dish soap. I personally never got it to work, I think it blocked the smell of the vinegar and flies didn't even come close. When I tried the vinegar on its own, they flew right in and drowned in it.

Depends on what kind of bugs! For some kinds of bugs, having 200k of them in my apartment would make me quite happy.

There are lots of different levels of cockroach activity. If you've ever been in a place that's had an out-of-control roach infestation for a while, you'll be familiar with the smell- not just of the bodies but the frass (looks like coarse ashy black dust) too. If you can smell it then there's a major problem. If you can't smell or see it then it may be at an okay level.

If you frequently wake up with bugs, try sleeping on an air mattress or something, in sheets and clothes that have all been washed and kept sterile, on a section of the floor that you've blocked off with diatomaceous earth in every direction. If the bites don't happen in a few nights of that, then you have a crawling bloodsucking insect problem.

The biggest issue is food and habitat. Every indoor environment is an ecosystem. If it makes sense for their populations to live there, they're going to, and any pest control is going to be an uphill battle.

• Cockroaches like dark damp places, so if you have any leaks, they'll flock to those. If you have any standing water they will find it. If there's a leak in the walls of a stick-frame construction, the damp plywood can harbor them basically indefinitely. You can make your own traps with smooth enough conic-section 32oz soup containers: leave the lid on, cut the bottom off, oil the inside rim, place it upside down with bait on the lid. There are lots of pest control products for roaches. Don't get the endocrine inhibitors, it won't satisfactorily solve your problem; you want the straight killers like emamectin.

• Flies like rotting and fermenting stuff. They'll land on it, but if it's all liquid, like a jar with vinegar sugar water, they'll drown in it. This control measure can be combined with fly strips which are pretty cheap.

• Moths like tight fibrous things, especially with a carbohydrate source, even more so if that source is damp or humid. Many of them will go away if you have one of those UV bug zapper bulbs/lights.

General stuff to keep a lot of pests out includes limiting the humidity, keeping all kitchen waste in a sealed container, keeping all carpets vacuumed and all smooth floors mopped, not leaving doors open, and making sure all window screens are intact and cracks are sealed. Unfortunately in most conventional housing, every seam has cracks and many aren't reachable.

Some things like spiders will curb the population of other arthropods. Centipedes will too, but they make most people (myself included) squeamish.

We need to keep in mind how much of the scientific framing (and thus our understanding of the matter) is shaped by Anglo ideology.

"Colony" and "queen" and "worker" are three such examples.

Is insect frass considered vegan? Asking for a friend.

More revolving-door presidential cabinets! MORE!

I used to compost the vegetable peels, now I feed them to my worms.

Sometimes it takes me a while to go through a sack of potatoes, and I am always going to aggressively peel what's left.

I was reading a scientific article a few days ago about mealworms (of course), and the process by which they extract water from the air. Turns out it more than doubles their metabolic rate just to do that.

So even the biomimetics isn't going to get us very far on this one.

The kind of solution you're looking for involves moist soils with high levels of organic matter. That, and using less water for economic activity.

I went by the farmers' market the other day and a stall had duck eggs for $8-10 a dozen. Buying 36-packs from Walmart is maybe about $1 a dozen. I don't see it going much lower than that, or higher than $20, though.

For a while now I've been fairly convinced that everyday expenditures scale logarithmically with income. The increase is pretty smooth, and tapers off pretty smoothly too.