I also think a steady supply of food is the best approach. I often add non-pressure treated sawdust to my BSF colony and I have a feeling that could have helped in your case. If the waste becomes wet it can lead to anaerobic conditions which are associated with the crashes. Of course you must have adequate drainage for a BSF colony but I doubt you could effectively drain certain waste such as the biscuit blob.

Adding to the carnage was the onset of somewhat cooler weather, but IMO the main issue was the near cut-off of food supply. The food I gave them during the 2 week period of gorging was a couple of large buckets of soggy, moldy biscuits. Yum. I fed them approximately 5-10 lbs a day for about a week and a half, as fast as they would eat because those biscuits were ripe! The BSFL proceeded to fill up a 2′ biopod to 1/2 way, at times the surface was 2-3″ deep with grubs. Unfortunately I didn’t have any large fish or chickens handy to feed them to.

Keep up the good work!!

The fact that BioPods are made in Vietnam is not a simple matter of outsourcing for cheap labor. Dr. Olivier has been working with the Vietnamese for several years and he lives there. He is trying to help the people improve their lives by using BSF as a sustainable and efficient way of feeding livestock and processing waste. I don’t know if BioPods could be made and distributed more cheaply here, but I believe the Vietnamese people stand to benefit from making them there and I support that. Furthermore, BioPods are distributed around the world so making them in the U.S. might make them cheaper here, but it would only serve to make them more expensive elsewhere.

I can only assume that the BSF were present in your worm bin for a few weeks and you just didn’t notice them. They would go where the food scraps were and I’m guessing they were buried.

Normally the dark brown mature BSF larvae would crawl away from the food source to pupate. Since they couldn’t exit your bin they must have just pupated and in that stage they look pretty much the same, just stiff. It’s very unlikely that they will be able to mate in your worm bin after they emerge as adults.

BioPods and BSF are great, but so are worms. Why not enjoy your worms until you have some extra money to spend on a BioPod. If you’re handy you could always build your own version of a BioPod like I did before they were available. My homemade unit isn’t nearly as efficient as my BioPod but I was still able to culture BSF with it.

Yesterday, I found ~lots~ of what I think are the pupa of the black soldier fly. At least, they look a lot like your photos. But, I don’t see any that wriggle around.

I wonder how they got there?

Can they just live out their life cycle in the worm bin? There is no opening in the Can o Worms for the adult soldier flies to get out.

The BioPod seems like an amazing product. Now I wish I’d bought that instead of the Can o’ Worms.

I don’t have a great design for a homemade BSF unit but you can use almost any covered container with an exit ramp. For a few reasons my focus is on promoting the BioPod by ESR/ProtaCulture. It was designed and tested by Dr. Paul Olivier, one of the leading authorities on BSF technology, and I doubt that most people could build a unit that will function as efficiently.

Considering the effort that went into the BioPod I believe the price is very reasonable. (I recently bought a Rubbermaid garden cart for the same price as a BioPod.) Also ESR/ProtaCulture is a model company and deserves to prosper. I recommend taking a look at the ESR website, I think you will be impressed.

I’d love to build my own contraption to dump them into a bucket to feed to my chickens ( http://www.nifty-stuff.com/new-chickens.php ) Any ideas on how to get the grubs to migrate from the compost pile into another container?