Welcome the BSF club!

Never seeing them in my area before I was nervous to touch them but left the larvae there to see what they grew into. A few days ago I was surprised to observe a large wasp-like adult fly away from the can. Its appearance made me wrongly assume it would sting or bite if aggravated.

Glad I found your site and will definitely keep the compost can poorly maintained for these beneficial little creatures.

I’ve read that people have successfully bred BSF in enclosures that measure approximately 3m square. I’ll see if I can find a source.

I can’t speak for SE USA, but in Australia, at least from Brisbane (Nimbin for Aussies ) north, we have year round breeding of wild BSF. They do slow down but continue to fly and lay eggs, even on the shortest day of the year.

While there have been green house trials (see http://www.circle3.com ~ PDF Links ~ Green House mating – factors ) that speak to captive breeding, the eggs have been sterile. They used small cages to breed the flies. Control groups outside the green house had fertile eggs, while ones inside did not.

I understand a breeder outside the USA has created a successful artificial light in a controlled indoor environment. I would be interested to hear if you have luck with grow lights. What model and brand, intensity do you use?

The habitat isn’t simply a warm environment. We also have a full spectrum light (replicates full natural sunlight). It’s not the average light that people have for lizards. It’s actually one used for indoor growing operations. Not a necessary thing for our beardies but one we felt they had a right to.

However, it’s significantly more expensive, requires more electricity and is a little more fragile (will break if water is splashed on it). So, I would imagine most that are just looking to have a few BSFL as feeders would not go to the trouble, or expense. But, since we are already doing both ;}, I thought I would like to give it a try. It’s not like the BSFL would really cost me that much so why not?

Alas, finding them seems to be the problem now so we may well need to wait until spring.

There have been several attempts to breed BSF indoors and to my knowledge no one has succeeded. BSF require natural sunlight to mate, and the length of the day is important. Simply giving them a warm environment with natural light hasn’t led to successful indoor breeding in the winter months. I did hear a rumor that someone had found a type of artificial light that the BSF accept, but so far there’s no documentation of it.

Good luck and keep us posted if you work with BSF.

Wow! I have spent all day, and I mean ALL day, reading every possible thing I could find about BSFL. The majority of it was from you!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

We are currently in the process of purchasing a farm and are looking at sustainable, environmentally sustainable practices, with as little work from us as possible. I worried most about feeding the pigs, chickens, ducks, turkeys and geese through the winter as I’m in Canada.

We obviously need to develope some type of breeding enclosure and keep the habitat indoors to produce the amount of BSFL we will need but I’m thinking! For now we are going to try it in our very large bearded dragon habitat. I haven’t read of anyone trying this particular set up before so I’ll keep you posted.

You can read a bit about us on our brand new plog at http://thebrockingtonsjourney.blogspot.com/

Thanks again, Carol-Anne