It's been a week that I've been feeding 1 lb of hog feed/day. This is substantially more food in terms of dry weight than I have ever fed them and the BSF seem to have grown very quickly on this diet. Under optimal conditions it only takes BSF 2 weeks to pass through the larval stage. The bin was normally fairly wet when I was feeding table scraps but since this feed is dry grain it has gotten pretty dry in the bin. In the last few days I've seen 3 or 4 BSF mortalities which I have not ever seen before. I previously guessed that the BSF population might be 10,000, but it could just as easily be 20,000 now. I suppose seeing a few morts in a group that size isn't unusual, but it still makes you wonder. The activity level since changing feed has been very high and the larvae are generating a lot of heat. Maybe that's the reason for the deaths.
I've never had to add water to the bin because the scraps were high in moisture, but I've decided to start adding a pint of water each day with the hog feed.
