I ordered new worms right away and upped the fan size. Now I cut up part of a pizza box into roughly 2″ squares and throw them in with every pile of kitchen scraps to break things up. System worked great through October until last week. We are getting temps in the low 20s now at night and the composter is running around 55 degrees, too low for efficient composting. I will be adding a heater this weekend, hooked up to the temperature controller (it can be set for heating or cooling).

The composter runs much wetter with the BSFs. I put in a drain and have the composter up on a stand (12″ diam. plastic pipe) with a small bucket under the drain to catch the drips. The castings I rake out of the bottom of the composter are very wet but don’t smell. I chuck them into the container plants, which seem very happy.

I feed it all the kitchen scraps (pizza, pasta, rice, bread, salad, fruit, whatever) except meat, roughly about 2 gallons of loose material twice a week plus the cut up pizza boxes. When it was running at 75 to 85 degrees it handled the load no problem. With the current low temp it has slowed down. Hopefully the heater will get it back to the 75 degree range.

Andrew

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’m guessing that the castings are wetter than you expected, and perhaps darker. I culture BSF without worms and the castings are almost black. The moisture content of the casting is directly related to the moisture content of the food scraps you add. The presence of BSF larvae allows you to process a lot of scraps very quickly and the combined moisture of all the food is released into your worm bin. BioPods are equiped with a liquid collection jar for this reason. If you want to make the castings drier you can simply reduce the amount of high moisture waste that you add. Adding dry grains/cereals will absorb some moisture.

For what I’ve read the worms do very well on BSF castings. I don’t know enough about worms to guess why they’re at the top, maybe someone else will venture an opinion.

Please keep us posted about any new developments.

- the “worm castings” are not brown and beautiful and crumbly like i expected them to be - with the BSFL present. it makes it difficult to decide when to harvest the “compost”… any thoughts anyone?

- i have recently seen a lot of the worms on the top of the bedding. the environment is very moist from the larvae, and i am concerned about this upward migration of the worms. how do people keep the moisture levels down?

- what exactly do the worms eat if the larvae consume so much of the food? are they eating the BSFL “castings”. it would seem that the by-product is nutrient rich…

thanks!!

I’m pretty sure that the BSF life cycle is not occurring within your containers. Most likely you’re having BSF females lay eggs on the outside of your bin. When the larvae hatch they are very tiny and can enter the bin through any small opening.

Here’s a photo of an egg and the larvae are of course that size or smaller at first:

If you keep the larvae contained long enough you will probably see adult flies emerge from the containers.

I’m not surprised you rarely see the adults because I’ve released 10’s of thousands of larvae on my property and sightings of adults is still relatively rare. The males don’t come around people or garbage, they’re only interested in mating. The females mate, find a food source, lay their eggs and then leave. You have to make an effort to see them coming to your bins.

This post might be helpful: http://blacksoldierflyblog.com/mythbusting-black-soldier-flies/

Thanks and good luck.