Dung beetles held up on way to work

A ground-breaking project to better a recreational farm park in Blenheim has been pushed back as close to 2000 dung beetles have failed to show up for work.

The poo-loving beetles, destined for the Wither Hills, to help with soil erosion – and to get rid of cow pats for walkers – left Auckland by courier post on Tuesday.

The beetles were scheduled to be set onto hillside cow pats on Friday morning, but the event was postponed after the Marlborough District Council realised the bugs had not arrived on time.

Council environmental science and monitoring manager Alan Johnson said while the courier system took about three days on average, it had been held up by Waitangi Day.

He said the dung beetles weren’t lost, and the council was tracking their movement. The beetles were expected to show up later on Friday.

‘‘They’re survivors, they’re in a dark space ... there’s no risk of losing them,’’ he said.

Dung Beetle Innovations cofounder Shaun Forgie, whose business the dung beetles were ordered from, said the council had purchased one Onthophagus tarus colony and one Onthophagus binodis colony, or about 2000 beetles.

‘‘We’ve done tests, and the beetles tend to survive up to nine days in courier boxes. They aren’t given food or water, so that when they come out, the first thing they want to do is eat poo,’’ Forgie said.

This helped offset the beetle’s fight or flight drive, and encouraged them to stay within the selected paddock, he said.

‘‘We’ve given the council seeding instructions. The cow pats in the paddock have to be fresh, because it’s the smell that attracts them,’’ he said.

‘‘To contain that flightiness, we advised they put the beetle on a cow pat and then tip poo on top ... in a poo sandwich.’’

Forgie said dung beetles were a ‘‘fantastic opportunity for the district’’, and it was ‘‘good’’ that the council had invested in them.

Johnson said the beetles would be released in a block on the eastern side of the Lion’s Hat, on the Wither Hills, which boasted about 60 cows.

The two species would be released into different sections of the same block, to give the two time to adjust before mixing, he said.

‘‘They’ll get established in there, the beetles will follow the cattle around, sniffing out their poo ... and the beetles will mate and multiply, in time,’’ he said.

‘‘We’ve paid for these beetles because we own the farm park, and we’re leading by example as a council landowner.’’

The dung beetles were set to arrive at the council on Friday night and released on Saturday morning, he said. A woman who kidnapped and interrogated two teenagers after they stole her cannabis was driven by her cannabis habit, a report says.

The woman, who cannot be named, found someone had entered the shed on her Blenheim property through a window, leaving a trail of blood. They had taken a bag of cannabis and several tools.

She spoke to her neighbours about the December 2017 burglary, trying to work out who the culprit was, and narrowed it down to a 14-year-old, a police summary of facts said.

The woman and an alleged accomplice took a metal pipe and tapped on the teenager’s bedroom window.

When he opened it, she asked him where the cannabis was, and told the boy to unlock the front door, the summary said.

The boy let the woman into the house, where she yelled at him.

The boy gave her a bag with the scraps of her cannabis in the bottom, and the woman demanded to know where the rest of the cannabis was.

She took his Playstation and games, and threatened to ‘‘punch