Catching bugs for chicken and fish food

Has anyone tried to build a trap for moths and June bugs using a light to attract them? There's an expensive gadget that hangs over a pond and has a spinning weedwacker type gadget to knock them out of the air. My pond doesn't have electricity. I thought that a trap at the house using a light and just capturing bugs to feed later might work. Or maybe a trap using solar lights.

I used to have a couple of 'bug zapper" lights that I would use, but they never seemed to catch that many. Perhaps it was the wrong time of year. And then the bulb burnt out and it was an old thing so it's suddenly way too expensive to replace! But where there is cheap power or solar I think it could really work, especially over a pond where the fish are active all night.....

I found that having a loose soil, with loose leaves covered area (compost pile) for the chickens to pick through satisfied most of their food needs. having a damp area with food scraps decaying to draw in bugs kept them busy scratching all day it seemed. If it seemed like they lost interest I would just rake the area and they would dive in knowing that I stirred up a bunch of critters for them to go after.

I liked the youtube i saw of black fly larvae
that were eggs on rotting fruit who fell onto i don't remember what and after a couple days wriggled up a slight incline to the feeding bucket. (And then tossed to the chickens.
I wanted a pond of bluegills with the black fly cage over it.
The slight incline would have a devider: one path leads to water (fish dinner) and the other to dirt where the larvae get a chance to become flies and breed again.

I wanted bluegill because tilapia won't take the cold. I'm not on property full time so i have not stocked the pond yet.

I do have a goldfish pond with a solar light in a Styrofoam float. I don't know how much that light attracts bugs. Time will tell.

Of course that slight incline with two paths has to have writing on it: "the lady or the tiger".

A few years ago I stumbled on a way to catch June bugs using only plastic planting trays and a well-lit window. No bait, no poison and no materials to throw out or clean. Simple as can be.

You can see it here

Hope this is of some use to you.

A couple spoonfuls of tomato/spaghetti sauce in the bottom of a 1 gallon glass jar left on the porch overnight; in the morning, plenty of palmetto bugs (big roaches really) to feed to the birds.

Wrong time of year but that video is gold. I have got to try to remember come May...we get an early start on bug season here.

Jennifer Smith wrote:Wrong time of year but that video is gold. I have got to try to remember come May...we get an early start on bug season here.

I think that the video was shot last May or June. I only recently had time and patience to actually learn to upload these things. Thanks for the compliments!

gonna try this come may. my chicks won't be big enough to eat them but ill kill them so they don't lay more eggs in my lawn. plus my fiance hates them! lol! good idea!

also I'm growing ivory roaches for blatticomposting. hopefully by time my birds are big enough ill have a ton of extras to feed them.