http://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=11556

I know very little about houseflies so I can’t comment about the article you linked to except to say that it sure is interesting. Keeping BSF through the winter is fairly simple if you can keep them warm. It can be done by insulating the colony and feeding them regularly but I think that any way you manage to keep them warm will work.

Good luck with the homestead!

Jerry

Yes, the larvae would do fine as long as they have food, warmth and moisture. They tend to avoid light in general, but they can always hide under the food scraps in the compost. It’s not unusual to see them on the top of a food pile in the daylight.

The BSF won’t breed in a BioPod or similar unit. The adults mate in flight and won’t do so unless they experience natural light in the proper cycle. They have been successfully bred in outdoor screen enclosures measuring 10 X 10 feet. They haven’t been successfully bred indoors to my knowledge.

Each winged adult BSF female will lay from 500-900 eggs in her short life of only a few days. I did have some egg laying in south Georgia during the month of October, but it was much less than during the summer.

I don’t know about BSF larvae being organic feed, but I would imagine it would depend on what they’re raised on if they’re in a controlled environment. Organic in/organic out?

The Phoenix worms may just be a way to start a colony, not benefit from it in the long run as in the long run you need your own breeders to come back.

If you did keep them in some kind of a set up, could you keep them there and would they breed? Do they need to fly to breed and if so, how big of an area does it require?

It seems to me that the BSF will produce a lot of babies even in the fall, so keeping their babies alive is what you want.

By the way, Jerry, if you grow BSF are they considered Organic Feed by the Organic Standards Board?

Thanks,

Tom

To establish a decent colony of BSF larvae you need breeding to occur which doesn’t happen in cold weather. BSF become relatively inactive when temps drop below the mid 70’s.

You can buy the larvae as Phoenix worms but they’ll be extremely expensive. An order of 1200 costs $59 from phoenixworm.com and will only amount to 2-3 cups. (Their website mentions this quantity as “12 cups”, but they don’t mean a true 8 ounce cup of larvae) Compare that to the 50,000 or more larvae that can make up a colony in a 2 ft diameter BioPod and you can see that it’s not very practical. I doubt a few thousand larvae could generate enough heat to thrive in cold weather even with insulation. You could work with a very small colony but I think you would have to find a way to keep the unit consistently warm.

Maybe you could keep a few thousand indoors for the winter and then move outside with the BioPod in the spring.

I suppose it doesn’t matter how you keep them warm, but the simplest method would probably be an insulating disc inside the unit, directly on top of the pile. The disc must have a gap around the sides for oxygen and also to let the grubs come above the insulation if it gets too hot beneath it.

Styrofoam is good insulation but the larvae will break up the unprotected material so it needs some type of cover. I haven’t tried using such a disc yet but I will be working on one soon. I think I’ll try including some type of convenient handle to facilitate removing the disc when adding food. An important aspect of cool weather biocomposting is regular feeding because food is the fuel that the larvae use to generate the heat they need.

Thanks for your comment Imani and good luck!

I can’t tell you much about lysine, but BSF meal fed swine and beef manure is compared to soybean meal for this amino acid. Check page 8 of the study I linked to for that data.

I have to admit that I’m a hobbyist and not a scientific researcher, so I’m more of a student than a teacher at this level. I’m happy if you pick anything useful out of my brain.

I will note that poultry by product meal is available in poultry rations which includes feather meal. The processes for these feeds usually kills the possible pathogens related to those animals. The whole bse (mad cow disease) does bring some concern over canibalistic forced feeding (which is what we do when we provide feed). Some species have no problem with this but they are mostly carnivores or in the least, omnivores. Bass, for example, will eat their own kind but are carnivores. Tilapia, in their lives are more to the herbivore side but have some omnivore characteristics at certain stages.

The thing that interests me over BSF is their ability to transform waste into a useful product and with your help Jerry, in an economical manner. Usually this takes a more complex and less understood biological action on the micro level (composting for example) where the nutrients are still there, but must then go through another vector (through plants again).

When I first looked into the BSF I was warned that they are more trouble than they are worth with their liquification problems. Maybe this isn’t a real concern as I have not seen it on my farm in stored manure. If we have a native population with any access to my manure (which you say there is a population near me in Lynchburg TN), I don’t need to worry about that concern.

I am particularly interested in BSF because they are high in methionine (by the cited studies) which is a limiting amino acid in poultry rations. This usually comes from an animal source (like insects). BSF provides that.

Another limiting amino acid in poultry rations is lysine. Any ideas of more natural ways to get lysine in a ration?

Thanks,

Tom