I sort of have a sustainability circle going with BSF, Vermicomposting, aquaponics, and raising tropical fruit and thought I'd be the first to post in the sustainability forum.

My BSF are fed kitchen scraps, deadfall from my fruit trees, pet waste, fish guts, and dead critter remnants that the cats drag home. (When raising commercial quantities of BSF I use feed, but at the moment have just a BioPod going so the BSF are being fed as listed above.)

In turn, the BSF generate residue which I use to feed my worms in the vermicomposting bins and as mulch on my banana, mango and carambola fruit trees. Effluent from the BSF bins fertilizes rainwater collected in wading pools where I grow algae and duckweed to feed the tilapia in my aquaponics systems. The tilapia's primary food though is BSF larvae which is supplimented with algae, duckweed, an occasional handfull of earthworms, snails collected from the sides of my fish tanks and grow beds, and if necessary commercially purchased fish food.

The tilapia generate ammonia and nitrite (toxic to fish) which are converted via biological activity into non-toxic nitrate which in turn is cleansed from the recirculating water by uptake from the growing veggies thus naturally purifying the water. The tilapia and plants become food for the table and their byproducts and waste are in turn fed to the BSF larvae.

I put a badly filmed, but perhaps interesting video up on YouTube explaining how it all works. Not sure how to post the vid directly here on the forum, but here's a link if interested:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UXCOmmD2ss

Brian I've edited your post to embed the video. Glad to see you active on the forum again

vermiculture, aquaponics, black soldier fly, hermetia illucens

Thanks BorealWormer. I never really left the forum, just have been too busy to post much. Keeping up with this aquaponics stuff has occupied a lot of my time as did my summer tour and getting my mother situated in the nursing home. Things have been hectic.

I messed up timing wise and had all my BSF bins full to the brim right at the time the egglaying here started to slow. I'll be moving the BioPod into the greenhouse and use any eggs collected to try a winter restart on my big bins. We'll see how that goes.

Tarvus,

Very nice! Do you run into much issues in that duckweed growing area with mosquitoes? Water chestnuts could also be a good bonus crop to grow under that duckweed...pretty hands-off and will grow/spread. Again, I like your set up and big thumbs up to pulling off a solid sustainability looped system.

Haven't noticed mosquitos, but if they were to show up a few gambusia netted out of my canal would soon solve that issue. I have had literally thousands of tree frog tadpoles hatch out in the duckweed pond, but they seem to cause no problems and the few that get scooped up with the duckweed soon disappear in my tilapia pond.

I'll have to look into water chestnuts. Thanks for the hint!