Bees and Crickets - Out to Lunch - It's Baton Rouge

Agriculture is one of Louisiana's major industries. But while we
know a lot about the rice, sugar cane and cattle farms around the
state, there are other types of farms and aspects of farming you
may not be so familiar with. For example, bees and crickets!

David Fluker is a second gerneration cricket farmer. David owns and
operates Fluker Farms, a Port Allen based family farm company that
grows live crickets and sells literally millions of live crickets
very year to customers around the country. These crickets are
traditionally fed to pets. But Fluker Farms is changing that.
They're moving into breeding and selling crickets for human
consumption.

Bob Danka is a research leader and research entomologist at the
U.S. Department of Agriculture Baton Rouge Bee Lab, who specializes
in the behavior and management of Africanized honey bees, honey bee
behavior related to crop pollination, and the genetically based
resistance of bees to mites, which as you may know, are very bad
for the bee population. Bob has been working in this field since
the late 1970s and is stationed at the Baton Rouge Bee Station, one
of the Capital Region's best-kept screts.

Photos at Mansurs on the Boulevard by Karry Hosford.

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