Comments on: Collecting the immature larvae

By: Jerry

Jerry — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 11:06:45 +0000

Hi Diane,

All stages of larvae are fine as feed. The lighter juvenile larvae are preferred by a lot of animals, most likely because their “skin” is softer.

You probably aren’t seeing the dark larvae because they migrate away from the pile as soon as they change whereas the juvenile larvae stay with the food. The dark mature larvae don’t eat and their only goal is to find a safe place to pupate. The dark color makes them harder to see and they tend to migrate at night.

A ramp has very little chance of succeeding in compost pile. The larvae don’t/can’t seek out a ramp even in a well designed unit; ramps only work when they are placed in the path of larvae that are being channeled in a certain direction by the design.

By: Diane Jordan

Diane Jordan — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 18:49:39 +0000

I was under the impression that only the dark grubs should be fed to chickens but I have fed them the lighter ones because they love them so much. Also my colony is in my compost pile and I don’t ever see dark ones. I have put a pvc pipe at an angle in there hoping to harvest some but that hasn’t worked. If they arn’t mature will they hurt the chickens?

By: Jerry

Jerry — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 17:38:48 +0000

Hi nancy,

You can try removing the dark brown mature larvae but I’m sure you’ll miss many of them. The best method would be to move the bins outside. Good luck!

By: nancy

nancy — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:09:16 +0000

I have 2 large worm bins in my office. They have both now wound up with many, many BSF larvae. I’m worried that when they turn into flies we’ll have thousands of BSF’s flying around the office. What can I do to prevent this from happening?
Thank you!

By: Jerry

Jerry — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 12:01:15 +0000

Ann, You're very welcome! I never had a drainage problem after installing the layer of coir in my original BioPod. The main difficulty with coir or any other filter material is that the larvae will tend to expand it to the point where it becomes ineffective. If you look at my DIY bucket composter you'll see how I'm dealing with that presently. Soon after getting my original BioPod I decided to replace the liquid jar with a straight drain. It's worked very well for me and you can find details on how to do it on the "tips and tweaks" page. Good luck and please let me know if you need help.

By: Ann in Ohio

Ann in Ohio — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 06:33:04 +0000

Hi Jerry, thanks for your reply regarding my biopod not functioning properly. I took your advice and read all the info available on your “tips & tricks” section. Now I understand that my problem was one of the coir filter becoming clogged, and also perhaps in my overfeeding the larvae. while I still do not understand how the biopod surface should look when it contains just the right amount of food for the larvae, I now know that I must very soon empty out the biopod and begin again, this late in the season. It stinks like sewage, and has been for at least a month. It will take a bit of shopping to come up with a new filter system, but hopefully I will get that together very soon. Thanks for all of the advice that I never bothered to access earlier this summer when the putrid smell began (I thought that was normal). I had also had a set-back when we went on a long weekend vacation and the fluid collection jar on the bottom of the biopod filled and backed up liquid into the biopod. I took it off and simply placed an open container underneath the biopod, which is a LOT easier to empty.

By: Jerry

Jerry — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:50:29 +0000

Hi SuunyD! (or is it SunnyD?),

All stages of the larvae are safe to feed to animals. If you tried really really hard you might be able to produce some toxic BSF larvae but you would have to consistently feed the colony with putrid meats, etc. If your colony smells like death you’ve done something terribly wrong and I wouldn’t feed the resulting larvae to another animal. BSF are repelled by the anaerobic conditions that lead to that type of toxicity so it would be difficult to mess up so badly.

I don’t know anything about chickens except that their meat stays moister while cooking if you brine it first. If they’re anything like the stray peacock (hen) that showed up at our place I might have a clue. I’ve trained the peahen to come and take BSF grubs from me and often I’ll give her all I have with me. (She comes around when I’m fishing at my pond.) A few times I had several hundred larvae and in those cases she reached a limit to what she wanted and stopped eating on her own. She’s a big bird of course and she’s eaten a few hundred at a time I would guess.

If you want better info about chickens you might try posting in this thread at Backyard Chickens: http://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=11556

By: SuunyD

SuunyD — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:14:41 +0000

Jerry, What BSF stages are safe to feed to chickens and/or ducks. Also, should I limit the amount of BSF grubs I feed to my poultry or can I feed them too many and make them sick?

By: Jerry

Jerry — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:04:21 +0000

Salli, having BSF in a traditional compost pile if great, but you really can’t control what happens with that type of arrangement. A dedicated BSF unit would typically be on some type of stand and you would treat the legs to repel ants. For my DIY bucket bio-composter I deal with ants by keeping it in a pan of water creating a moat they won’t cross.

Some types of ants might not bother the BSF other than competing for food, but I know that some will prey on the eggs and maybe on the grubs too.

By: Salli

Salli — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:46:46 +0000

I followed one of the suggestions about putting food scraps on a paper plate & just setting it in the bin on top of the compost. Ants crawled all over it. The food stuff is mostly asparagas stems.

What do the ants mean & are they hurting the grubs/compost. I am not sure if they are fire ants or something else.

How do I get the ants out of the bin?
Thanks for any help offered.

Salli