Thousands of Grubs in Compost ( picture and video )

[geedub]

Quote:
My BSF grubs have gotten to know me pretty well. They've confided in me and they think humans are nasty looking.

ps. I hope you enjoy your grubs!

 

[SunnyD]

geedub, I do the same thing (container with holes punched in bottom) to separate my grubs from the shavings in the catch bucket. I just pour them in the container and put it in a large tub. I then lay the container lid on the bottom of the tub and in a short period of time the grubs all crawl out and seek shelter under the lid! I just scoop them up and feed 'me' birds.

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

What are some of their favorite foods that will pull them from all corners of the pile into the bowl?

We don't have cat / dog food around... any other ideas? What are some food staples that could be used or prepared that everyone has on hand to lure them into a collection bowl and potentially away from the other stuff they are munching on?

 

[SunnyD]

Quote:
Nifty, I don't know I was clear or not, but I am separating my grubs after they have made the trip to catch bucket. In my case you would use nothing as they are just going to go until they hit the edge of bottom of the tub and then just continue in circles. That's why I lay something for them to "hide" under so they'll just collect in one area. If you are referring to the catch bucket geedub made and put inside his pod to harvest the grubs in early stages, I would recommend any kind of fruit or damp grain. But my number one thing to get my grubs to jump the pod early and into the catch (harvest) bucket is wheat bran. Once I didn't have saw dust to put in the catch bucket and thought "hey I'll just use this wheat bran I have for my other animals".....OOPS the next day almost all of my larvae had deserted the BioPod for the catch bucket and I had to dump all the young ones back in to finish eating

 

[Tweeza]

I am thrilled that others are finally jumping on the Black Soldier Fly Larvae band wagon!!!!!! I kept my bin in the outside shed last winter successfully. I got 5 gal buckets full of coffee from IHOP. I got them for the ants. I don't think it affected them so the last bucket I gave to the larvae.

I have asked several stores for their expired produce but none are willing. It seems they are afraid of being sued should I eat it and become sick.

I have been tempted to ask folks I give eggs to to save me their leftover scraps and coffee grounds but have not as yet.

 

[theburtschickens]

tweeza,
just tell them you're composting it. trying to explain BSF larvae to a restaurant owner may be too much, haha.
secondly, others have posted the suggestion...contact the local farmer's markets. our vendors give it to us for compost, but they also give tons (literally) away to people who want it for their pigs.
good luck finding your larva food!

 

[geedub]

BSF will eat such a wide variety of foods it's hard to say what might be the most attractive. Soft fruit is always quickly eaten but if I had to choose one food type as the best I would pick damp grains as SunnyD suggested. It's even better if the grain is slightly fermented. I'm also fascinated by how much the larvae like coffee grounds. I don't understand what nutritional value it would have and I wonder if they're attracted to the caffeine.

A good source if you're in the country is the waste from neighbor's gardens and fruit trees. Where I live there are lot of old Kieffer pear trees. This type of pear doesn't really get soft so it's mostly for baking and sauces. My neighbor has 3 mature trees and for the last month I've had more food waste than I can use. The pears release a lot of liquid though so you have to be sure your unit is draining well.

If you're not having success with the collection tub I linked to you might try withholding food for a few days to narrow the selection a bit.

 

[geedub]

Hi all,

BSF season will be here soon and I just published plans on my site for constructing a DIY BSF composter using a basic 5 gallon bucket. You can't process tons of material with it but it's a good size for learning the ropes. If you want to expand at some point you can just make more bucket composters or apply the same techniques to a larger container. The small size of this unit should create some possibilities for hanging it in a coop or pen. Anyway, I just wanted to share my design with any of you who may be interested.

BSF Bucket Bio-Composter

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

Great timing! I was actually thinking it was about time to check out my BSF colony and try to come up with a way to keep a section of them happy and self harvesting throughout the season.

Your homemade BSF bucket design looks very interesting. I'll look at it closer once all the images load.

One suggestion: the page loads really slow for me and I think I know why. All the images aren't thumbnails of larger images, but are just full resized versions of the images which means each 400kb image is loading up when the page is called. Usually not a problem, but on a page with 30+ images, that ends up with a page that is about 12mb in size!

 

[geedub]

Thanks for bringing the image sizes to my attention Nifty! I'm replacing them with proper thumbnails now.