Column: How I survived the great mealworm flood of 2016

It started out as a beautiful summer day. I had no idea of the trouble that lay ahead as I approached our backyard chicken coop.

I was on morning snack duty. Every day, my husband, Paul, or I, bring dried mealworm out to our three hens. We check for eggs and refresh their water at the same time.

Dried mealworms are a favorite with the ladies—Snowy, Hope and Nellie. I always hold out a handful for them to peck out of my hand, which doesn’t hurt me, and they seem to like it. Then I’ll toss a handful into their pen and go around to the back of the coop to check for eggs.

For some reason, on this day I set the open bag of mealworms on top of the closed lid of the pen before I headed back to the nest box. The wooden lid runs across the width of the pen and is a bit more than a foot wide. The rest of the top of the pen is made of chicken wire.

Perhaps you can see where this is going.

As soon as I opened the lid of the nest box, I heard the bag fall over. I ran to the pen and saw that mealworms were pouring into the pen. The chickens’ food bowl, water dish, and a small saucer that held oyster shell (for calcium) were filled with the tiny creatures. There was a pile of them immediately below the lid, while more were scattered around the pen.

The chickens were looking like it was Christmas in July. They wasted no time in gobbling up the mealworms.

I snatched up the bag and set it away from the pen. Then I got the bowls out of there. I yelled at the hens to stop eating, as if that was going to do any good.

The sad thing was, this had happened before. And in the very same way. Will I never learn?

It was a waste of mealworms, yes, but I was more worried about my girls. Was it possible they could overdose on mealworms?

I ran to the garage and grabbed a hoe. I managed to scrape a lot of the mealworms to a corner of the pen, but I couldn’t pick them up. So I resorted to propping up the hoe at an angle, to keep the chickens away from the pile. Then I grabbed the stick we use to prop open the coop roof (for cleaning) and shooed the chickens away from the pile.

What was I going to do? The hens had finished pecking at the random mealworms at the back of the pen and were now eyeing the pile. Not for the first time, I rued our lack of a walk-in pen. We didn’t think we had enough room for one, so we bought a small model meant for up to four chickens. It includes the coop, which is raised off the ground to allow the ladies to run around under it, and the pen. The pen is about three feet high and in theory can be easily detached from the coop. In practice, we only move it once a year to flatten the soil and readjust the pen. It’s a two-person job, and it’s not an easy task.

Because of this design, which works well 99 percent of the time, the only way I could get to the pile of mealworms was by reaching down through the open lid. Unfortunately, my arms were too short.

So there I was, stuck in limbo, poking a stick at my dear friends every time they came near the pile. They quickly caught on that if they ran under the coop, they could approach the bounty from the rear. Of course, when they did that, I tapped them gently on their chests with the stick and they ran off.

It was getting hot and I was getting moist. I assumed Paul would wonder where I was, but then I remembered I had told him I was going to do some planting after I took care of the hens. I tried calling his name, but I knew it was no use. The coop is 200 feet from the house, and partially blocked by a two-story garage and a lot of greenery.

Maybe I could get the girls into the coop. Then I could shut the door and go get Paul. I put a few pieces of mealworm in their now-empty water dish and put it in the coop. First Hope went in, and then Nellie. Snowy made her way up the ramp to the coop door. I held my breath. Nope. She decided to go under the coop to make an end run at the pile again.

I believe I was out there 20 minutes before Paul wondered where I was. Then he went to the front yard and saw I hadn’t done any planting. He went out back and saw the garage door was open. Paul wondered why I was still with the chickens, and then felt something might be wrong.

Finally, he looked out back and saw me leaning at an odd angle over the pen. Yup, something was wrong all right.

Paul, with his longer arms, was able to scoop out much of the pile. The ladies still got more mealworms than they needed, but we just fed them less feed for the rest of the day. We worried a little about the aftereffects of this adventure, but let’s just say the mealworms apparently provided roughage—and that was the worst of it.

The next day, when I went out at snack time, the girls were waiting for me. When I reached the pen, they were excited and making noises that I’d never heard before. It was a veritable cacophony.

I stood, puzzled, and then realized they were looking at the red mealworm bag I was holding. They were hoping for a repeat of the Great Mealworm Flood of 2016.

Nothing doing. I gave them a handful, and then set the bag down on the ground, in a secure location.