The egg cluster is light brown after the larvae hatch and the texture looks “fuzzy”. A picture is worth…..

(click image to enlarge)

… a thousand eggs.

My chickens didn’t want the food so I’m offering it to the BSF Gods! My most recent post on that thread discusses what I did with the lid that has 3 clutches of eggs. You mention it takes 4 days or so for them to hatch? My question: What do the egg clutches look like AFTER the larvae have hatched?

Thanks!

finally I started my project this week, and this is the blog:
http://projectoms.blogspot.com/

I will explain the evolution of this spanish larvae

The reason the BioPod manufacturer says not to process fecal matter of any kind is because of liability issues. Anytime you handle poop there is a risk of infection. Processing pet waste with BSF is probably similar to cleaning a toilet, you keep your fingers out of your mouth while doing it and you sanitize yourself afterward.

You certainly could add pet waste to the colony and they would process it easily. As with any type of waste you would want to make sure you didn’t overload the colony with a large amount at one time. Of course if you added any type of manure you would have to expect a certain amount of odor which isn’t usually an issue when you process kitchen scraps.

BSF that have been raised on animal waste have been tested as animal feed in several studies. Often in these studies the grubs were sanitized by cooking or drying before being fed to animals, but not always. I’ve read that if you raise BSF grubs with manure, that you should not feed those grubs back to the same genus of animals. For example, if you raise the grubs on mammal waste you could feed them to birds, reptiles, and fish. If you raise them on chicken manure you could feed them to mammals, reptiles, fish, and so on. My knowledge about this is limited, so you should do some research before taking any action.

Thanks for your business Harmon, I’m glad to hear that your BSF eggs hatched and are thriving. Let me know if you have any more questions.

I’m in zone 8b, in Georgia just a few miles from Florida. I did overwinter my colony this year, but poorly. I didn’t process much waste and mostly the colony was dormant. By this spring I still had several hundred 5 month old grubs surviving from last fall. In warm weather the same grubs would have developed fully in 2-3 weeks.

You can certainly suspend the development of the grubs with refrigeration. I think 50-60ºF is about right, but I haven’t tried it myself. Something to consider when refrigerating them is that they still need air and they must not dehydrate.

The commercial ProtaPods are available but shipping is really expensive due to the size.

Is that the 4′ commercial unit you have there? Are you selling those yet?

Interesting that the BSFL can essentially go into “suspend” mode over the winter. I wonder if you can do that intentionally by keeping them in the refrigerator? I once bought regular fly larvae as fish food and kept them alive in the fridge for approx 2 months.