Anyone using black soldier flies?

[CluckyJay]

Yummy.

 

[D3invertebrates]

lol I think maybe because of the word fly people must have a problem with raising bsf, meanwhile theres like 400 pages on growing mealworms lol mealworms are way harder to raise you wont get anywhere near the same kind of production especially proportionate to the amount of effort put in plus there not nearly as nutritious. Not trying to be mean or anything but it really is unfortunate how ignorance rules most peoples lives. My parents for example refuse to have anything to do with bsf and they have a pile of poo behind there barn thats about 15 feet high and around 30 feet around its massive they use pesticides and pine shavings so it will never break down either they have actually also had disease issues from there horse because of pest flies that have cost them thousands in vet bills but they still refuse to make any changes for a person like me its hard to watch. Its a shame people fear change so much that its actually a disabling factor in there lives.

 

[CluckyJay]

That is really sad. Maybe some day they will see how well black soldier flies can reduce that waste and repel pest flies!

 

[<3 N.C Chicken Chick <3]

Thats cool thanks

 

[Tracydr]

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Makes sense. People were talking about feeding rotting meat and I'd heard of chickens dying from botulism eating fly maggots. But if they eat so fast and you don't give them too much should be good.

 

[Tracydr]

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That's kind of normal for people who grew up in the 50s-60s. Better living with chemicals. My neighbor is always coming over and telling me about spraying this and that chemical, he's been spraying his yard weekly for ticks and has a huge tick problem with one small short hair dog. I have 10X the trees and 3 dogs, have seen about 6 ticks all summer. Once you start with chemicals the whole ecosystem gets out of whack. No good bugs, no birds to eat bugs, no microorganisms.

 

[CluckyJay]

It seems like I read a study stating that you can feed the feces of a species to the BSF and then feed the self-harvested maggots back to the same animals. Something about how they expel their digests before harvesting themselves. The maggots secrete an antibiotic as well.

Feeding back to same species. I cannot find the article but I am almost certain I found a Government PDF about feeding the self-harvested larvae back to the species they were reared on.

Here is something a bit better than a personal website. It isn't the study I found earlier though.

http://aquaculture.noaa.gov/pdf/comment_pdf/sheppard.pdf Search within the page for "may reduce"

About them.


http://www.nypestpro.com/soldierfly.html

http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/waste_mgt/smithfield_projects/phase2report05/cd,web files/A2.pdf

 

[CluckyJay]

Keep in mind too, what you feed your maggots will determine how much fat/protein they contain (at least from what I have read). It is a bit like raising other livestock, to get a good, consistent product you have to manage them.

 

[D3invertebrates]

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Yes it is really hard for some people see the effect of chemicals, I try and remind people that these chemicals were developed by mass murdering nazis to exterminate the jews and now the companys that are selling these same chemicals slightly altered to kill bugs instead of people are in general just as evil as the nazis who invented the stuff. Look at the monsanto corporation there business practices arent exactly what you might call friendly and yet people everywhere mindlessly spray roundup all over the place. Once you start messing with the balance of nature its hard to get any good outcome there. I recently worked for a ranch with a few hundred sheep and goats and well they started giving them a liquid wormer and goats got sick so they gave em more wormer which I advised against and goats started dying from to me what looked like dehydration so they just gave em more wormer and before you know it goats mostly were dying all over the place. I quit after trying to convince them one last time they were killing there own animals in a horrible way I might add, they actually were so diluted they put the blame on me, saying they need someone that would take better care of there animals...jeez. No matter what they just couldnt make that connection, to them there was just no way they were doing anything wrong.

 

[tom e]

I agree with you on this. I think that some people (notably the biopod folks) are erring on the side of caution because of the liability involved should someone do something unsafe and then get sick.

Everyone has to do what they think is best- for myself I don't see any harm in letting my birds eat bugs that eat their poop. Realistically, it's not like I could stop them anyway. Even if I don't allow the BSFL to eat their waste, they will still scratch in their own litter for housefly larvae (don't everyones birds do this?) and they (the housefly larvae) don't expel their digestive tracts at all from my understanding. If I was really really worried about it, I'd just try to make sure that the larvae they are eating have self harvested already- therefore not in their still eating and growing phase.

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