Hello, Great to see a new forum opening up.

I'm in the high desert area of AZ which I suppose is too dry for BSL. However, I will soon be starting an aquaponics project. I believe the aquaponics green house my have the humidity necessary to support a colony. I am looking to have the system be as sustainable as possible and thought the BSFL may work as a supplemental fish food. I would then feed back to the larvae any fruit/veggie scraps from the garden. Would the plant stalks at the end of harvest be too woody for the larvae, or could it all be recycled through them? Any thought or links to relevent articles would by helpful. Thanks.

Just found the post in the "Knowledge base" regarding lavae vs. earthworms as food for frogs and saw that the earthworms seem to be a better option with catfish. I would think the case would be the same for talapia. The residual from the BSF composting does make a good base for an earthworm bed, right? I could always use the BSFL for my chickens.

"Duckweed Dave" in Sarasota is using a mix of duckweed and BSF larvae to feed his tilapia. Not sure if Dave is a member yet on this forum, but I will shoot him an email and invite him to join. I'm sure he can contribute a lot of info regarding BSF and aquaponics.

I think the BSF would do well in your aquaponics greenhouse, AZdesertFarmer - particularly in the larval stage. You will need to raise a large enough colony to hit a "critical mass" point where you have enough larvae maturing into flies all at the same time to support mating and egglaying to keep the population replenished. Though the glass or plastic panes in the greenhouse admit sunlight, they do reduce the amount of uvA and uvB light admitted and this seems to cut down on the rate of mating and egglaying as compared to an outdoor population. Last winter I maintained a large population inside a plastic greenhouse tent (with containers of water inside to foster high humidity levels). I found it took about 40 mature flies buzzing around to provide one egg cluster per day inside the greenhouse. I estimated 800 adult flies and was getting 20 egg clusters per day. When the adult population dropped to 200, I was getting 5 egg clusters per day. I had no way to ventilate my greenhouse tent without allowing adult flies to escape and daytime temps would often approach 130F - less than ideal temps obviously, and that might have affected the repro rate I experienced. If you can regulate temps better, your results could be significantly better.

The BSF will love your garbage and garden fruit/veggie scraps, but they don't much care for high cellulose foods and will not do well on the plant stalks. Best to just compost that stuff the old fashioned way. Good luck with your aquaponics project and your BSF herd! Please keep us in the loop with your results!

AZdesertFarmer welcome to our forums. I've moved this topic out of the temporary beta testing forum to a more permanent home.

This might interest you:
Black Soldier Flies in the Garden Pool (link)

Oops! Messed up my last reply, AZdesertFarmer. Sorry 'bout that. Here's some video taken at ny good friend, Duckweed Dave's aquaponics setup. it would appear from these vid snippets, that the fish truly relish BSF grubs:)

Very cool vid Brian. BSF mating and now underwater movies - your talents never cease to amaze

FYI for youtube vids just enter the video ID string (the part after v= in the URL)

Thanks for posting the cool video Brian!

In the south there are plenty of fisherman who can tell you how effective "mealworms" (BSFL) are as fish bait. Once I fed more than 30 large juvenile larvae to a redear sunfish that was less than 6 inches long. Large fly larvae are very commonly sold as bait in the UK although I'm pretty sure they are another species of fly.

I took a few videos of the fish in my pond eating BSFL. The camera I used had relatively low resolution but I plan on shooting more with my new camera this summer.

Jerry, you've definitely got some redear breeding going on in that pond! I see at least four beds in that first video!

I shot that video about a year after stocking the redears and I fed them BSFL regularly. I haven't paid much attention to the pond lately but it should be getting close to spawning season soon.