By Janet Gruy Winter
Who knew!
Flies are nothing but a bother, right? And a possible health hazard. Something to ban from the kitchen and attempt to keep away from the vegetable bin. But it seems that not all flies are bad guys: enter the Black Soldier Fly (Hermetia illucens) —or BSF to their friends. These are flies that don’t walk all over your food looking for the tastiest bits. These flies aren’t interested: they don’t have mouth parts. BSFs live only to breed then lay eggs, whose larvae will give us a hand with our garbage disposal problems. But our side of the bargain is to make these helpers welcome by providing them with room and board. The room is fairly easy: a dark box with an entrance and an exit they can recognize, and a place to lay their eggs. The board is all our kitchen and vegetable garden leftovers!
Our first boxes, built with instructions found on —what else— YouTube, were amazingly successful. These boxes were portable, and with secure tops: thus, rat proof. We added a breather tube which would waft about the perfume of the contents and attract the flies to enter the box. How do we discriminate and attract only the desirable BSFs? Evidently other flies don’t like complete darkness; and once the BSFs are in residence they emit a pheromone that repels other flies! (Heads up, chemists)
A stack of small corregated cardboard squares was suspended from a wire hanging near the entrance tube over the food. The BSFs obligingly laid their tiny gold dust eggs into the cardboard. Within days the eggs hatched and the larvae fell onto the food —literally—devouring everything except egg shells and citrus rinds, growing fatter and fatter and slightly hairy.
An exit tube was attached to ramps on the inside and a catchment bottle on the outside. The mature larvae will wriggle up the ramps looking for a place to pupate, then drop into the recepticle provided. There they accumulate until they can meet your chickens, who will love them to death. We are also freezing some of these plump larvae, that are allegedly 50% protein, for the dogs’ tidbits. Very fashionable, our dogs.
This effort is not just about making quality chicken food; BSFs give us plant food. The content of my boxes is a bit squishy so far, but mixed with a bale of straw makes lovely friable compost in a few weeks. The liquid that we drain off via a spigot at the base of the box is mixed with water to the color of a whisky & soda, then offered to the potplants at the cocktail hour. It seems to keep the cilantro from ghosting so early.
What began as a search for a non-smelly, non-pest attracting method to dispose of the considerable kitchen and vegetable garden waste —a garburater that used no energy and never got bunged up— ended with additional rewards: chicken food, plant food, and compost starter.
So far, it’s win-win with the BSF. Who knew I could ever love a fly.
JGW
