Hi 267, I'm afraid it's a no no. According to a person that helped design the BioPod if you feed animal waste to BSF you must feed the resulting grubs to animals of another genus. If you feed chicken waste to your grubs you can in turn feed them to mammals, reptiles, or fish.
I think I've read studies that involve feeding BSF animal manure and then using the resulting grubs as feed for the same animals, but I believe the grubs were processed into a meal first. I think the main concern involves parasites/pathogens and that processing the grubs solves that problem.
I'm actually breaking that rule as I've described earlier in this thread. I'm feeding culled fish and fish scraps from my pond to my BSF colony and then feeding those grubs back to the fish in the same pond. This earlier post explains why I'm making this exception:
Originally Posted By: GW
Randy, I've done some thinking about the closed loop represented by grubs eating fish/fish eating the grubs, and my guess is that it's not a problem. I think that because of the dynamic you find in the pond in first place where every species is feeding on every other species including their own kind. In other words I'm picturing the pond as a closed loop itself, or at least somewhat closed if that makes sense.
For example; BSF grubs eat a small fish from my pond and then other fish eat those grubs. The fish that eat the grubs could have just as easily eaten the fish that were fed to the grubs, depending on their size. Parasites or pathogens would be passed from fish to fish as they eat each other, and inserting the BSF into the chain doesn't seem like it would change much IMO.
Having said that, injecting BSF into the equation might actually lessen the survival of pathogens/parasites. Tests indicate that BSF reduce e. coli and salmonella in food waste. The digestive system of BSF grubs is extremely powerful, lowering the survival rate of pathogens.
It's too bad that you can't feed those grubs back to your chickens. I wonder what it would take to process the grubs enough to make them safe. Pasteurizing them wouldn't make them sterile, but it might lower the risk to a reasonable level. The nice thing about Pasteurization is that it doesn't require very high temperatures.
