refreshing the colony

May 032009
 

restarting the colony 2009

Starting my third year with the black soldier fly

I’m going into this season with a small colony made up of grubs that were laid last fall. Where I live the winters are mild so it was fairly easy to maintain the colony through the cool months. At the end of last summer my BioPod was full of compost and I should have harvested it.  As a result of that neglect my beautiful compost became anaerobic, dense and a bit smelly. What can I say? It’s been a hectic year. :) I think early fall may be a good time for removing the BSF compost because the grubs are likely to be less active on average in winter versus the warm months. I believe the churning action of a very active colony (summer) is an important factor in keeping the compost aerated and “fresh”. I said early fall for compost harvesting because I’m afraid that if you wait too long in the season you won’t have time to rebuild the colony to near maximum size in preparation for the winter when BSF breeding stops (unless you’re in the tropics).

Spring cleaning

first BSF of 2009

BSF don’t normally land on people,
but this one had just emerged from it’s pupa so I was able to handle it.

I removed all of the compost and washed my BioPod. I hand picked a few hundred of the light colored juvenile grubs from the old compost and added them to the unit along with some fresh food scraps. I didn’t clean the grubs themselves so a small amount of the old compost was transferred along with them. This old material will act as a great attractant to BSF adults who have now started the mating season. A healthy and balanced BSF colony doesn’t have a strong or bad odor, but the females will always be attracted to the faint scent of an established colony. As I mentioned previously, my compost is anaerobic now and therefore smelly, but the typical mild smelling compost from a balanced culture would work just as well.

BioPod-spring cleaning

A new drain

As you can see from the first photo in this post I have replaced the BioPod’s liquid collection jar with a straight drain into the ground. (I hope you won’t be too disappointed with me Dr. Olivier.) I haven’t been gardening and to date I haven’t done anything productive with the liquid (also called “tea”). For that reason I’m opting for the convenience of the straight drain for now. To see how I set up the drain you can go to my “Tips and Tweaks” page.

The pond

You can also see my pond in the photo. I moved the BioPod near the pond because I’ll be feeding fish scraps and culls to my BSF colony this year. I don’t enjoy killing fish, but to maintain the population in a healthy balance I will be removing some of them. I’ll have some help from birds, turtles, and snakes, but the pond is fairly close to the house and wild predators are limited. With the BioPod I’ll be able to convert the excess fish into nutritious black soldier fly grubs and return them to the pond as fish feed. I have a post about my philosophy regarding feeding BSF grubs to other animals here.

Black soldier fly grubs are also fantastic fish bait, so having the BioPod near the pond will be very convenient for fishing. I’ve created a page about BSF as bait which you can find here.

Winter BSF culturing

As I mentioned earlier I did keep the colony going through the winter, but I didn’t keep any records. The one thing I can confirm is that the BSF grubs will interrupt their usual development during the cold season. I had very few BSF laying eggs by October and the last one I observed laid her eggs late in that month. By November I stopped seeing any smaller grubs in my colony. I assume then, that the grubs that  currently make up my colony are at least five months old. During the summer this stage would only last 2-3 weeks. Next winter I want to be better prepared to test cold weather bio-composting and I hope that some of you will participate in it with me. At the end of this summer we should start a thread about this at the BioPod forum to share strategies and results.

Logging this year’s results

My goal this year is to keep a log of all the food I add to the colony and the weight of the grubs produced. I’ll be fairly general about recording the composition of the food scraps so this won’t be a controlled experiment. The fact that I’ll be adding a large amount of whole fish and fish scraps will certainly effect my results. My goal is to provide a general outline of what you might expect. You can find the log in the column on the right of this page under Black Soldier Fly Pages, or simply click here.

solider

Collecting the immature larvae

Jul 252008
 

This method doesn’t involve the dark, prepupal larvae which are self-harvesting

The coffee colored black soldier fly grubs (prepupae) are the final stage before pupation into adult BSF (Hermetia illucens). To our advantage they are programmed by nature to crawl away from the food source in search of a suitable pupation site. In a properly designed BSF unit these larvae crawl up a ramp and drop into a collection bucket where they will live for weeks without any maintenance.

The method described below is for harvesting the earlier stages when the larvae are actively feeding and growing. It doesn’t work for the mature larvae because they don’t eat therefore aren’t attracted to the bait in the collection container. It works very well for the light colored immature larvae.

The Immature Larvae Collection Device or ILCD (old butter tub)

Take a cheap container and cut some small holes around the bottom edge.

immature larvae collector with fish pellets

(click on images to enlarge)

Add something delicious (any food scraps will do), and simply place it on the surface of the compost. I used moistened fish food because I’m training my fish to eat it and this is a good way to introduce them to the flavor (I feed the larvae to the fish). Just about anything will work, but fresher items will make handling the collected larvae more pleasant.

The photo below was taken 2 minutes after placing the tub on top of the compost.

immature larvae collector after 2 min

This is after 11 minutes.

immature larvae collector after 11 min

The photo below was taken 40 minutes after adding the container.

immature larvae collector after 40 min

This quick harvest totaled about 2 cups (.5 litre) of small to medium larvae. I don’t have many large larvae at this time due to the crash I caused in the colony a few weeks back. I do have a lot of larvae, just not large ones yet.

fishing, bait,