Black soldier flys on accident

RichnSteph

Songster
5 Years
Mar 25, 2014
882
170
176
Adkins Texas
Last month I started fermenting feed for my grandmothers chickens in the hope that we could cut down on her feed costs. Long story short is that she suddenly didn't like the idea of feeding FF and threw it all out. That and the feed was attracting too many flies. Flies?? So I snuck out last week and started a new batch of FF in an empty butter container and in about 6 days there were several black soldier flies (big ones and little ones) buzzing around the container.

So I converted it into a hanging BSF hatchery and placed it out in the yard under a grape vine with a piece of card board in there for them to lay eggs into. I don't know how long it'll take but I'm hoping to have a nice little "seed" hatchery that I can use to get a larger one started out at our house.
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I have 0 knowledge on this topic.
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Why do you want to hatch these black soldier flies? I haven't even heard of these creatures! Please enlighten.
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I have 0 knowledge on this topic.
idunno.gif
Why do you want to hatch these black soldier flies? I haven't even heard of these creatures! Please enlighten.
lol.png

A BSF hatchery is basically a self populating automatic organic chicken feed producer. Once it's up and running the flies will constantly be laying eggs and the larvae will be crawling out of the fermented feed and out to the ground for the chickens. If you make one or two large enough (i.e. plastic 55 gallon drum) they will produce a pretty healthy amount of grubs. I'm hoping that two BSF hatcheries placed around the chicken run and a meal worm farm in the barn will help cut down on my feed costs for our flock.
 
Ahhh! It all makes sense now, thank you for that info. I don't think we have these flies in N. Dakota, maybe we do but I've never noticed them again. Interesting idea though! Bet that puts a decent dent in the food bill.
 
Hmm. I don't know if I ever saw any that far north (I spent 18 months in Devils Lake ND with the Army COE) but to be honest I really didn't notice them down here until I got on this forum.
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We are truly hoping to only have to buy enough feed to get our meat birds to weight before slaughter and then keep enough on hand to ferment some to attract more grubs. Our chickens are going to have an acre to free range on so I hope they can forage a little as well.
 
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