Well, it makes a change from our present story of gales, snow, sleet, trees down, phone and electricity lines down. It is Germany in the summer of 1934 and there descends on an estate in Brandenburg a plague - a plague of insects which we do not often see here: Maybugs or Cockchafers (melolontha melolontha). The Collins Book of Insects says that in early summer in these islands a big pinkish beetle may come crashing against your lighted windows. It is of some size - up to 35 mm long, but is harmless. "Harmless to us, that is: the beetle does untold damage to trees and other plants by eating foliage and flowers. But their fat, white larvae do much more. They live in the soil for three or four years and eat plant roots."
So it happened in the German estate of Zernikov. Clara von Arnim, wife of the baron, in her autobiography remembers that summer only too well. If you sat out under the chestnut tree in the front, the beasties were all over you, fell into your food if you tried eating. The baby in his pram could not be left out. Soon the deciduous trees were stripped of their foliage. A real plague. And they knew that the grubs they would leave in the ground would destroy their crops and the young trees they had planted. Drastic action had to be taken. Not the poisonous spray that might be used today. Hens were the first troops. They were rushed to the trees and let loose to clear the ground of any grubs. Pigs, too, were sent to sniff out and destroy the grubs.
As to the maybugs themselves, Clara's husband, the Baron himself, recruited the Arbeitsdienst or Nazi workforce for the young. (They marched with shovels instead of guns.) They were given long poles and huge sheets of tarpaulin and went early in the morning where the Maybugs rested, and were very stiff or slow at that time of day. The men rattled their long poles in the foliage and down came the bugs like a shower of rain onto the tarpaulin sheets. They were brought by the hundredweight to the estate house. The author remembers the total weight being 36 cwt. That would be (would it not?) nearly two tons. The bodies were then roasted and ground down to be suitable to feed to the animals, saving on normal fodder.
One had to be careful, she says, for, in this form, they were very high in protein. That was an unusual harvest for 1934. She doesn't say if it was widespread in Germany.