Anyone using black soldier flies?

[tmoore8595]

Can some one post a picture of a black soldier fly?

https://www.google.com/search?q=bla...YmjDoS5sAW-g5CYDQ&sqi=2&ved=0CJABEIke&dpr=0.9

 

[RichnSteph]

Edit: Never mind... tmoore beat me to it.

 

[islafarm]

Hi all! Does anyone ever have problems with their BSF pupae being carriers of tapeworm? And if so, do you put chicken poop in your BSF bins?

I have 2 separate bins - one for poop, and one for everything else. But last week I had the 'brilliant' idea of throwing some of the old decomposed chicken poop into my main bin and now I think I might have introduced tapeworm into my main bin. I clean poop from my coop and run twice a day and am very diligent about putting it in the poop bin - at the same time getting a good look at the poop. This morning I noticed - for the first time - tapeworm segments in 2 of the poops. I don't know where it could have come from. I feed fermented food and added a load of cayenne and turmeric to it with this batch - maybe this caused excess shedding of the tapeworms? Though I don't think so as tapeworms need another host for their lifecycle and therefore need to be shed.

Concerned now about feeding my BSF pupae to my chickens, hate to think that I messed up on such a grand scale

Any thoughts / observations / suggestions would be welcomed,

thanks,
Ancel

 

[DrTacosMD]

Hi all!  Does anyone ever have problems with their BSF pupae being carriers of tapeworm? And if so, do you put chicken poop in your BSF bins?

I have 2 separate bins - one for poop, and one for everything else. But last week I had the 'brilliant' idea of throwing some of the old decomposed chicken poop into my main bin and now I think I might have introduced tapeworm into my main bin. I clean poop from my coop and run twice a day and am very diligent about putting it in the poop bin - at the same time getting a good look at the poop. This morning I noticed - for the first time - tapeworm segments in 2 of the poops. I don't know where it could have come from. I feed fermented food and added a load of cayenne and turmeric to it with this batch - maybe this caused excess shedding of the tapeworms? Though I don't think so as tapeworms need another host for their lifecycle and therefore need to be shed. 

Concerned now about feeding my BSF pupae to my chickens, hate to think that I messed up on such a grand scale 

Any thoughts / observations / suggestions would be welcomed,

thanks,
Ancel

As a general rule of thumb, you shouldn't feed your BSF poop of animals that you'll be feeding the BSF to. For example, chicken poop to BSF to chicken: this is an example of something you shouldn't do. And the more similar the animals are, the more hesitant you should be to so: like wild bird poop to BSF to chicken. Since diseases can pass between similar animals.

Therefore, if you want to use BSF to compost the chicken poop, maintain a designated bin for chicken and all bird poops. Do not feed the larva in that bin to your chicken or any birds. And maintain the other bin free of bird type waste. Even if you don't use the other bin, it should still boost the amount of larva in the other bin since it'll produce a high population of adults to breed in the other bin.

Now theoretically you should have no disease/parasite transmission between the bins since mature larva transforming to pupa will eject their digestive system and lose any microbes within. And adults don't eat and live such a short time that they wouldn't be able to exchange microbes and parasites between bins.

Hope this helps; this is basically what I'm doing right now.

 

[islafarm]

Hi DrTacos,

thank you for such a quick reply! I deliberately set up two separate bins to keep the larvae apart - and both bins are in 2 separate areas on the farm. My intent with the poop bin is to grow out the pupae to increase the local population - actually my initial intent was / is to deal with the poop. It was in a non logical moment that I threw half a 5 gallon bucket of frass from that bin into my main bin. It still had immature grubs in it that I wanted to 'save'. My poop bin only receives chicken poop and coffee grinds, my main bin receives all the waste from our farm produce (fruit and veggy trimmings). The chickens receive the pupae only from the main bin (until my mistake last week).

Thank you for reminding me about the purging - the tapeworm cestodes are full of eggs which hatch in the intestines of the intermediate host - they then migrate into the "body cavity" - which is elsewhere defined as any "fluid filled space" in the body - in the case of the BSFL would it only be the digestive system? And therefore purged? That would be splendid.

I won't be passing any more immature grubs and frass from poop bin to main bin!

I wonder if my immature grubs were carrying tapeworm and purged - if the hatched tapeworm cystercercoids could live in the environment of the bin? Probably not?

Thank you, you've helped a lot!

 

[DrTacosMD]

Hi DrTacos,

thank you for such a quick reply! I deliberately set up two separate bins to keep the larvae apart - and both bins are in 2 separate areas on the farm. My intent with the poop bin is to grow out the pupae to increase the local population - actually my initial intent was / is to deal with the poop.  It was in a non logical moment that I threw half a 5 gallon bucket of frass from that bin into my main bin. It still had immature grubs in it that I wanted to 'save'. My poop bin only receives chicken poop and coffee grinds, my main bin receives all the waste from our farm produce (fruit and veggy trimmings). The chickens receive the pupae only from the main bin (until my mistake last week). 

Thank you for reminding me about the purging - the tapeworm cestodes are full of eggs which hatch in the intestines of the intermediate host - they then migrate into the "body cavity" - which is elsewhere defined as any "fluid filled space" in the body - in the case of the BSFL would it only be the digestive system? And therefore purged? That would be splendid. 

I won't be passing any more immature grubs and frass from poop bin to main bin!

I wonder if my immature grubs were carrying tapeworm and purged - if the hatched tapeworm cystercercoids could live in the environment of the bin? Probably not?

Thank you, you've helped a lot! 

Np!
And for more info on BSF, and if you have the time, check out this link and the other vids in its series:

 

[islafarm]

Thanks

I'm familiar with those videos, watched them all, couple of times! Are you on either of the BSF forums?

Having spent all evening researching tapeworms, I do think the BSF can be hosts to at least 1 poultry tapeworm: Choanotaenia infundibulum

but that doesn't explain how the chicken could have been infected initially.

I do think that the immature grubs I added to the main bin could have been infected, but I don't think the infection would spread throughout the whole bin. Of course I have no way of knowing which are infected but I imagine the crawl off from those relatively small number of grubs will complete within the next week at the very most. Then the bin should be good again.

Now I have to work out if all the chickens have cestodes in their poop, and how to kill them - this morning I gleefully fed them to ants, but tonight I read ants are also hosts

- though the chickens don't appear to eat the ants.

think I'll be subscribing to this thread . . .

thanks again!

 

[RichnSteph]

Hmmm. I've been feeding our BSF larvae the poop from our chickens for over a year and never had an issue. I clean out the poop board (a tray with Stable Dry in it below the roost) once a week and the poop goes straight into the bin. I add a little water from our AP tank to moisten it and it's gone in less than an hour. I've processed several birds from our flock and have yet to see anything in the digestive tracts to indicate tape worms. Just as an FYI I also drop all the cleanings from chicken processing into the bin for the grubs to eat, along with any cleanings from deer, squirrel and even dove and quail that I hunt. I even toss in any dead frogs from the pond, fish that didn't make it and everything in our fridge here and at work that has gone bad. Once a month I rake through the bin and clean out all the bones and other large debris and throw all that in the trash so that they have a nice turned substrate to crawl around in. If I can ever source some more used brewers grains that will be the primary feed for the grubs but for right now I use what I have on hand. Hehe I've even convinced our neighbors to save all of their kitchen scraps in a bucket I gave them so that I can feed it to the grubs. They are happy to hand over 5 gallons of waste for a dozen eggs in trade and it keeps my hens happy. I also feed the grubs to our fish that we raise for our table.

BSF have an amazing ability to consume almost anything, even human waste. I don't put human waste in there but I've read several articles about third world countries that do just that to help clean up the area and provide feed for livestock from the larvae. Everything I've read indicates that there is zero transfer of disease or parasite from the feed to the larvae.

We eat our chickens and the eggs they give us and I'd not give them any sort of food to include the BSF larvae if I thought there was even a slight chance of transfer of disease or parasites.

RichnSteph

 

[islafarm]

Hmmm. I've been feeding our BSF larvae the poop from our chickens for over a year and never had an issue. I clean out the poop board (a tray with Stable Dry in it below the roost) once a week and the poop goes straight into the bin. I add a little water from our AP tank to moisten it and it's gone in less than an hour. I've processed several birds from our flock and have yet to see anything in the digestive tracts to indicate tape worms. Just as an FYI I also drop all the cleanings from chicken processing into the bin for the grubs to eat, along with any cleanings from deer, squirrel and even dove and quail that I hunt. I even toss in any dead frogs from the pond, fish that didn't make it and everything in our fridge here and at work that has gone bad. Once a month I rake through the bin and clean out all the bones and other large debris and throw all that in the trash so that they have a nice turned substrate to crawl around in. If I can ever source some more used brewers grains that will be the primary feed for the grubs but for right now I use what I have on hand. Hehe I've even convinced our neighbors to save all of their kitchen scraps in a bucket I gave them so that I can feed it to the grubs. They are happy to hand over 5 gallons of waste for a dozen eggs in trade and it keeps my hens happy. I also feed the grubs to our fish that we raise for our table.

BSF have an amazing ability to consume almost anything, even human waste. I don't put human waste in there but I've read several articles about third world countries that do just that to help clean up the area and provide feed for livestock from the larvae. Everything I've read indicates that there is zero transfer of disease or parasite from the feed to the larvae.

We eat our chickens and the eggs they give us and I'd not give them any sort of food to include the BSF larvae if I thought there was even a slight chance of transfer of disease or parasites.

RichnSteph

Interesting . . . I haven't read anything either that says that there's a chance of transfer of disease or parasites. And I've looked. These tapeworm didn't start with the BSF, they picked them up from elsewhere. And it's probably just me over-thinking / worrying that I had compounded the issue with the addition of chicken poop BSF eaten frass to my main bin.

Regular house flies are intermediate hosts of Choanotaenia infundibulum which made me think that the BSF could be too. The tapeworm segments fall as part of the poop. They are full of eggs and move. A fly / beetle / ant eats them and the eggs hatch in the intestine and then migrate through the intestinal wall into the body cavity. The chicken eats the fly / beetle / ant and becomes infected. I have dropped this tapeworm infected chicken poop into my poop bin. I imagine that the BSF larvae are eating everything and eat the segment - the egg then hatches, and migrates. The last instar's purging won't affect the developing cystercercoids because they're not in the digestive system. Is there something special about the BSF (and we all know there is!) that would make it not be a host? I have no idea if the cystercercoids could survive the metamorphosis of pupae into flies.

This is completely theoretical if the birds don't have this tapeworm

and I'll keep researching, really so far I've found nothing either way.

I've seen BSF in pit latrines and it's quite impressive, I'm tempted to have a bigger poop bin - my only reservation is how to transfer the poop to the bin. I don't see me building any type of overhead platform anytime soon

I think we have the same design bin! I'm really impressed at what you're putting in there, mine just get fruit and veggy peels etc from our farm. I'd love to get my hands on some spent brewers grain, or distillers mash, but no luck in this area. I imagine my bin is a lot wetter than yours, I try to rake it through every day.

cheers!
Ancel

 

[Crs1]

I have about 6or 7 of what I am assuming are BSF flying around my back door a lot. Do they have a jerky flight? Anyway. My question is can I start a bucket of fruits and veggie scraps and place close to the area and attract the BSF and then have the larvae. Is it that easy? And if flies get in a I have maggots is that bad for my chickens?
Thanks