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.