WHAT do outdoor dining and the dung beetle have in common?
Well one cannot occur without the other according to dung beetle farmer and expert on the subject, John Feehan.
“Sitting outside and enjoying a meal was a very rare thing 30 years ago,” Mr Feehan said.
“The reason for it being almost impossible was the world-renowned Australian bush fly.
“It was illegal for a restaurant to put a table outdoors.
“It was deemed a health hazard and the health department banned the serving of meals outdoors completely.
“This is because the food attracted bush flies; thousands of them.”
He said it was the humble dung beetle which should be thanked for today’s outdoor dining opportunities.
It wasn’t until the dung beetle started cleaning up cow manure, taking care of cattle business, that these pests no longer had places to breed and grow.
“Bushflies breed in unburied cow dung in farmers’ paddocks,” he said.
“Two litres of good quality dairy dung can easily turn out two to three thousand bush flies per cow pat.
“Every cow in Australia drops about 12 cow pats a day and within that bush flies live for about three weeks.
“This leaves no doubt how high the number is when it comes to bush flies.”
He said the type of dung influenced the kind of bush fly attracted to it.
“Poor quality may turn out just 500 flies while good quality dairy dung attracts the most,” he said.                                                                                                                                  “They feed on the leftover protein from the grass because cattle remove only approximately 60 percent of protein from the grass they chew.
“The other 40 percent goes through the animal and is dropped on the ground.
“Bush flies, dung beetles, internal parasites and many other organisms live on that leftover protein.”
Once the flies have fed, the female lays a cluster of eggs inside the dung.
“The eggs hatch after about 12 hours and then the larvae require six days in an undisturbed cow pat to survive and this is the weak link and where dung beetles come in.
“Dung beetles can quite easily bury or shred cow dung in 24 to 72 hours.”
He said he’d seen cow dung disappear within a few hours but any burial in less than 72 hours in paddocks where dung beetles were working well was considered a win.
“When the beetles removed dung and moved it underground the flies breeding ground disappeared,” he said.

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