Get this though.... they have become a decorating commodity around the yuppie u.s. People paying good money for em... My mom and sister have me collect them every year and they give em away to their friends for decoration...
Osage orange. The tree yields a bright yellow wood, hard (and as heavy)as concrete, and turns golden over time. In WWI, dye from this tree was used to color uniforms, no joke.
I heard that they would keep fleas out so several years ago I put them around my house. I don't know if it worked, but I was willing to do anything at that point.
I always called them "hedge apples" and osage orange is aka hedge-iron around here.
When I was a kid we had a cow choke on one. Don't know if it was going down or coming back up, but it formed itself to the size of her windpipe and got stuck. The vet was able to ram it back down her throat and she was fine.
Whatever can happen-will happen.
Osage Orange, hedge apple, bois darc, bodark. I've always heard that they are good to keep spiders away. I've seen our Longhorns chowing down on them. The chickens love to scratch and peck the seeds out of them if they get smashed when we run over them in the field.