Hey Randy. BioPods have a container underneath to collect the filtered liquid. The amount of liquid the black soldier fly larvae produce is relative to the water content of the waste you feed them. My neighbor, the good Mr H, gave me a bunch of spoiled cucumbers from his garden last week and my larvae have been putting out a lot of liquid since I started adding them. Last year when I was feeding the larvae only dry hog feed I had to add water everyday. The feed was pretty cheap (17 cents/lb) and I'm going to use it to regulate the amount of liquid in my unit. If it gets wetter than I want it to be I'll just add a few handfuls of the dry feed which will absorb it.
I get very few gnats or other flies in my container now that the BSF larvae are thriving. Are your containers covered except for some small vents? An enclosed space helps to concentrate the larva's info-chemical that repels other flies. More larvae in the container will have the same effect I think. If you combined all of your larvae into one container and covered it well I doubt you would have many gnats. My unit currently has a 2-3 inch layer of larvae.
Another reason you may be getting excess gnats is because you're adding too many scraps for the number of BSF larvae you have. Whatever you feed them should be completely gone in a day or so. Maintaining that balance will also keep bad odors from developing.
I've also noticed that fish prefer the grub-colored immature larvae over the final stage coffee-colored larvae. I think that when I'm feeding my pond fish the mature larvae on a daily basis that they will get conditioned to them and take them just as eagerly.
Randy, have you confirmed that you have wild BSF laying eggs in your container?
DJT, thanks for the encouragement, I hope the Pond Bossers can accept "our type" (me and other BSF lovers) around here.
I don't believe there is a bait that will attract BSF without attracting other flies initially, but there may be a procedure to accomplish what you're talking about. To get to the point where other flies are repelled you need a substantial BSF larvae population in a relatively closed container. You could get to that point very quickly by adding a few thousand BSF eggs or young larvae to a new container and then closing it off to outside flies completely. Once the BSF reach a certain density in the container you could open it to outside flies and I expect that species other than BSF would be mostly repelled. One problem might be that the initial larvae would mature and migrate out at roughly the same time and you could have a gap between their presence and that of the new larvae deposited by wild BSF. That might be solved with a second introduction of eggs or small BSF larvae to stagger the population.
DJT, feeding filamentous algae to the larvae is on my list. I also want to see what they do with duckweed and other pond weeds.
