Thanks for the previous posts GW.
We know that BSF larvae have a hefty appetite. Phoenix Worms Shop on the other hand instruct their customers to not feed the larvae and just use them as needed and hence they are shipped and stored in what appeared to be sawdust. Of course when I got mine I did the exact opposite and to town the soldiers went the second I put food in there. \:\) They have thrived from that point on and I have released all of them into the wild up here in Northern Wisconsin.

My question is... for adequate growth and pupation, what is the minimum amount of food required for the larvae to develop? In nature they probably don't come across the banquet of foods and respective quantities that we feed them do they?

For experimental purposes I did try feeding them various types of manure (free feed) and they absolutely loved it. I tried cow manure, pig manure, dog droppings, and rabbit droppings. All were consumed. Some literature out there states that cow manure doesn't work very well. I found that to be true but only due to it's harder consistency. If mixed with a little water they will consume it happily. The same goes for dog droppings. The other thing is they preferred fresh manure to five day old manure. When fed fresh manure, the fowl smell of manure was neutralized fairly quickly however I found that five day old dog droppings released a foul sewer like odor when being consumed by the larvae. The smell fouled up my neighborhood so bad that I never determined whether it was a fluke or not and quite frankly for the neighbors sanity I won't be trying it again anytime soon. Perhaps if I mixed in a little water that would have solved the problem.

Anyway, enough talk about feces. I just thought I'd update you on what I found and wanted to see what your thoughts were on minimum amounts of feed. At the current rate I am finding that for every pound of larvae yielded you need 5 to 8lbs of feed. I would like to see if we could get that down to 2 lbs or perhaps even 1 lb of feed without hurting the larvae. That would prove BSF to be economically feasible for many types of applications wouldn't you think.

Thanks again.

Jav

Last edited by Jav; 09/02/08 10:10 PM.