Raising mealworms provides an excellent educational experience, teaches responsibility, and can provide bird food and ready bait for fishing trips. We started raising them when my daughter brought home the "leftovers" from her science lesson at school and convinced me the little bugs didn't bite.

We found a plastic shoe box and placed about two inches of corn meal in the bottom. Wheat bran, oatmeal or chicken mash are acceptable substitutes. We sliced a potato into sections and placed it on top to provide a little moisture without actually moistening the meal enough to sour. Sliced apples and pieces of banana peel can be used, but can sour and become odorous. We covered the potato and meal with a soft cloth to give the beetles a dark place to hide and provide a place for them to lay their eggs.

Mealworms, or larva, burrow below the surface of the grain and undergo several molts. Their development is most rapid at the optimum temperature of 80° F. After the last molt, the larvae come to the surface and metamorphose into naked white pupae for 6 - 18 days and then into beetles. Adult beetles have wings but rarely fly. They lay their eggs 9 - 20 days after emergence and then die. Egg incubation is 4-19 days. The tiny newly hatched mealworms can be seen on the cloth with a magnifying glass.

Although we've had our mealworm farm on a shelf in our home for over two years without covering them, the beetles are supposedly capable of flight. You may want to cover yours with a lid that provides good air circulation or a piece of nylon screen. I have also yet to find a worm that crawled out, the sides of the plastic box are too slick for them to scale.

Maintenance is simple. Feed with potato slices once a week (old, wrinkly potatoes work fine) and a cup of fresh meal every couple months. A couple times a year I sift out the live worms and beetles from the old grain, wash the container, and start out with fresh meal. Throw the old meal in the garden or in the outside trash. Avoid using the kitchen trash can because there will be tiny worms that you won't be able to see to sift out.

Besides being fun to watch, our mealworms provide ready fishing bait, food for our year old goldfish (my little ones and I really get a kick out of hand feeding him worms), a tasty treat for hungry birds and the fun of watching them eat, and a novelty to guests. Rarely does a guest leave without someone showing them our mealworm box and giving them a lesson on the mealworm life cycle!

Start your mealworm farm with the leftovers from your next fishing trip or just buy a carton of worms and get started. The work is minimal, the rewards many!

Imagine a picnic by the lake...comfortable lawn chair, cool drink, catfish line in the water, kids netting minnows in the shallows, just far enough away to allow you to see them yet be able to enjoy the soft noises of nature. You watch as the kids race to the cooler and hear them argue over who gets the last name brand soda. The arguing stops as one of them declares, "Yuck!! What is this thing? Get it off me!" Your blood chills as you hear someone announce, "leech!"

So much for relaxing! You lay your pole behind the chair, hoist yourself up, and wonder...how in the world did they get leeches!

Most leeches are parasites and share the same classification as earthworms. They measure from about 5 mm to 46 cm (0.2 to 18 inches) in length. Leeches can be found nearly every place there is water, especially in still, warm waters of shallow ponds, lakes, and marshes. Leeches hide away in dirty water, under rocks and among plants waiting for a victim. Sensitive to their environment, they become excited at any change and will move about trying to discover what is moving the water or causing a new odor or smell. There are at least 650 different species of leeches, many of which are not bloodsuckers.

Unfortunately, the little dark brown leech hanging on to your kid is latched on tight and obviously enjoying its feast. You try to brush it off, but your hand slides right over it.

Leeches have a sucker at each end of their body, one for feeding and one for hanging on. A leech attaches itself to the victim using the suckers. The sucker surrounding the leech's mouth contains three sets of jaws that bite into the host's flesh, making a Y-shaped incision. Saliva from the leech contains chemicals that dilate blood vessels, thins the blood, and deadens the pain of the bite. Because of the saliva's effects, a person bitten by a leech may not even be aware of it until after the leech drops off, when he or she sees the incision and the trickle of blood that is difficult to stop.

As the leech feeds, the blood passes into a dilated, branched stomach, or crop. It can consume up to ten times its weight in one feeding, then it lets go and drops off. The leech eliminates the fluid part of the blood, storing only the solid parts.This meal may take several months to be digested, allowing them to survive long periods of time between feedings. Some may live for a whole year between feedings.

So....do you let the little parasite finish its feast? Not if you're the normal person. Just the thought of having something sucking your blood is enough to turn your stomach. But, believe it or not, for centuries leeches provided a common medical treatment. The original surgeons were barbers and they used leeches to cure anything from headaches to gout! Headache sufferers might have leeches attached to veins on their temples to suck out the "bad" blood causing the headaches.

Allowing the leech to feed and drop off on its own is probably not a good option with your child screaming, jumping around, and scraping at his skin with sticks. The leech is fully attached or it would have been swept away by your hand. Have the child sit down, calm down, and quit trying to pull it off. Removing a leech by pulling or scraping it off could leave the mouth parts imbedded in the skin and cause infection. You can encourage a leech to let go and drop away by irritating it with salt or heat. A fairly safe way to use heat is to light a match, blow it out, and immediately touch it to the leech.

Anticipate some bleeding. The wound may try to bleed for several hours. Chemicals from the saliva of the leech contain an anticoagulant that keeps blood from clotting and forming a scab. In recent years doctors have begun to use leeches to help restore blood circulation to grafted or severely injured tissue. Placed in strategic positions, leeches can reduce the swelling of any tissue that is holding too much blood. This gives the body time to regrow the small capillaries needed to allow the proper circulation of blood. The benefits of the treatment lie not only in the amount of blood that the leeches ingest, but in the anti-bloodclotting (anticoagulant) enzymes in the saliva that allow blood to flow from the bite for up to six hours after the animal is detached, effectively draining away blood that could otherwise accumulate and cause tissue death. This is especially important where very delicate repairs have been made to torn tissue. Active investigation is under way since leech saliva has been described as a better anticoagulant than many currently available to treat strokes and heart attacks.

Clean the site with soap and water or an antiseptic. Apply triple antibiotic ointment to help minimize risk of infection and the development of cellulitis. A small pressure dressing to the site can help slow the flow and contain the blood. Hiding the blood is important to kids and will help little Emma quit crying that "Josh is going to bleed to death."

Latest kid problem solved, you rummage through the cooler for a fresh drink. Just as your hand closes around a frosty root beer you hear your lawn chair topple over. You look up to see your pole heading for the water. Drink forgotten, you sprint for your pole and grasp the rod just as it goes under the water. Wrenching it from the weeds and moss, you absent-mindedly brush a leech off the back of your hand and start battling the biggest cat you've ever hooked.

p.s. If contact with still, warm water is a possibility with your Backwoods adventures, you may want to throw a few packets of salt from your favorite hamburger joint and a book of matches in your first aid kit. Until next time.....Maggie.

The evidence suggests that gun control has not made England a safer, fairer society.

Americans who believe that more guns mean more crime awakened earlier this month to find, to their dismay, that the Justice Department and the federal courts had affirmed their constitutional right to be armed. Presumably, they would have preferred restrictions based on the English model, where the toughest firearms regulations of any democracy have been credited by gun control advocates with producing a low rate of violent crime.

But there are two problems with that model. When guns were freely available, England had an astonishingly low level of violent crime. A government study for the years 1890-1892, for example, found only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in a population of 30 million. In 1904 there were only four armed robberies in London, then the largest city in the world. One century and many gun laws later, the British Broadcasting Corp. reports that England's firearms restrictions and 1997 ban on handguns ''have had little impact in the criminal underworld.'' Guns are virtually outlawed, and, as the old slogan predicted, only outlaws have guns. And what is worse, they are increasingly ready to use them.

Five centuries of growing civility in England ended in 1954. Violent crime there has been climbing ever since, and armed crime - with banned handguns the weapon of choice - is described as rocketing. Between April and November 2001, the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose by 53 percent. Last summer, in the course of a few days, gun-toting men burst into an English court and freed two defendants; a shooting outside a London nightclub left five women and three men wounded; and two men were machine-gunned to death in a residential neighborhood of North London.

Gun crime is just part of an increasingly lawless environment. Your chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York. England's rates of robbery and burglary are far higher than America's, and 53 percent of burglaries in England occur while occupants are at home, compared with 13 percent in the United States, where burglars admit to fearing armed homeowners more than the police.

This change in English crime is indicative of government policies that have gone badly wrong. Gun regulations have been only part of a more general disarmament based on the premise that people shouldn't need to protect themselves because society will protect them. It will also protect their neighbors. Citizens who witness a crime are advised to ''walk on by'' and let the professionals handle it. First, government clamped down on private possession of guns; then it forbade people carrying any article that might be used for self-defense; lastly the vigor of that self-defense was to be judged by what, in hindsight, seemed ''reasonable in the circumstances.''

The 1920 Firearms Act, the first serious British restriction on guns, required a local chief of police to certify that the potential gun owner had a good reason for owning a weapon and was a fit person to have it. All very sensible. Yet over the years a series of secret Home Office instructions to police - classified until 1989 - narrowed both criteria until, in 1969, police were instructed that ''it should never be necessary for anyone to possess a firearm for the protection of his house or person.'' Since 1997, handguns have been banned. Proposed exemptions for handicapped shooters and the British Olympic team were rejected.

Far more sweeping was the 1953 Prevention of Crime Act that made it illegal to carry any article in a public place ''made, adapted, or intended'' for an offensive purpose ''without lawful authority or excuse.'' Carrying something to protect yourself was branded antisocial. Any item carried for possible defense automatically became an offensive weapon. Individuals stopped by the police and found with such items were guilty until proven innocent. As a concerned member of the House of Commons pointed out, while ''society ought to undertake the defense of its members, nevertheless one has to remember that there are many places where society cannot get, or cannot get there in time. On those occasions a man has to defend himself and those whom he is escorting. It is not very much consolation that society will come forward a great deal later, pick up the bits, and punish the violent offender.''

In the House of Lords, Lord Saltoun argued that the object of a weapon was to assist weakness to cope with strength and this bill was ''framed to destroy.'' He added that he did not think governments ''have the right ... though they may very well have the power ... to deprive people for whom they are responsible of the right to defend themselves ... unless there is not only a right but also a fundamental willingness amongst the people to defend themselves, no police force, however large, can do it.''

But at government insistence the law passed and became permanent. A broad 1967 revision of criminal law altered the common law standard for self-defense so that everything turns on what appears ''reasonable'' force against an assailant, considered after the fact. As the author of a leading British legal textbook pointed out, that requirement is ''now stated in such mitigated terms as to cast doubt on whether it [self-defense] still forms part of the law.''

Taken from the Associated Press

Hi Folks! Sorry I missed you last month. I had some personal business to attend to and now I'm back and ready to write. This month I would like to discuss a recent decision that I have made. After hours of practice, and hundreds of dollars spent on getting my Golden Eagle Splitfire 32 Compound Bow just right, I have decided to go back to the basics. I have decided to bow hunt with a traditional recurve bow.

A friend of mine, who is also president of a local Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation chapter, put the idea in my head and at first I thought he was crazy. After all, he had been shooting a Matthews Solo Cam that has blazing speed and he is quite an avid bow hunter who shoots very well. Stories from his bow hunts in years past helped get me started in bow hunting in the first place. So when he started talking about walking through the woods and sneaking up on a deer with no sights, cams, and arrow rests, etc. I was intrigued. The idea of just you, the deer, and a simple bow with an arrow started giving me fantasies that I could not get out of my head.

The next thing you know, I was on the internet trying to learn all I could about traditional bow hunting. I also visited my local bow shops and tried to soak up all the information I could. I mean after all, when you take on an endeavor that you know nothing about, there are a lot of questions to be answered. Should I shoot a Long Bow or Recurve? Carbon arrows? Aluminum? Wood? How long should the bow be? How many pounds? Etc. Etc.

After about a month and reading 2 issues of Traditional Bowhunting Magazine (which by the way I would recommend to anyone who is interested in traditional bow hunting), I was ready to buy a bow.

I bought a Fred Bear Recurve Bow set at 50 lbs. I had some arrows made with 5" Helical Feathers and was ready to shoot. My before mentioned friend, Reed, lent me a book written by G. Fred Asbel called Instinctive Shooting, and I've been practicing ever since. The joy I get from shooting this bow is unbelievable. I am hooked. My wife, Susie, who by the grace of God has tolerated me for the last 17 years, could not quite understand why I needed a new bow when I had a perfectly good $700.00 bow that was only 2 years old. I did what any true red-blooded American man would do, and blamed it on Reed for putting these ideas in my head.

So my friends, this fall I will be hunting deer with a traditional bow and if I am lucky enough to take one with this equipment it will be a trophy of a lifetime.

If any of you shoot traditional bows I would love to hear from you. I can always use any help I can get. By the same token, if any of you would like to get started shooting traditional bows, e-mail me and I would be glad to share any information I can with you. E-mail me at: kenny@backwoodsbound.com

I'm Kenny, and I hope I have all of you in my corner.

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