Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have been adding a couple inches of water to the bottom of the harvest bucket. They drown after about a day in the water but they can't climb back up the walls of the bucket, and they are cleaner.

Is it a bad idea to give fly-maggots to the fish? Why the preference for BSF maggots, a maggot's a maggot right?

One reason is BSF don't actually have mouths, so they don't bother you when you're eating like the common house fly. I hate flies as it is, definately don't want to be growing a huge colony in my backyard

checked the harvest pod and full of dead flies and maggots again, i did see 2 bsf's on pod last week but no joy as yet, may clean out pod and wait til January hot spell

It's Working ! No more little ones !

Got a few Saturday morning

Got a handful Sunday morning

Got another handful this morning

System seems to be working as exactly as Joel, Faye and others have described.

Still getting maggots - but their ratio against the BSF larvae is decreasing so I expect they'll be totally gone in a week or two.

Good to see Nigel, what postcode are you in. Just for when someone says "Are they in my area?"

6056.

I'm in Greenmount. So anything Midland and surrounds is probably a dead cert for getting them.

If anybody wants some larvae to try and start a population, let me know - I'm happy to help. I don't have my AP ystem set up yet, so am happy to give them away and am just freezing the extras.

Thought I'd try an experiment.

First observation with the BSF larvae is that they only appear in the harvest bucket when I check in the mornings. If I empty it in the morning and then check a couple of times during the day, there are no more BSF larvae, i.e. they're only coming out at night.

Seeing as BSF larvae do not like the light, this made sense as the pipe down to the harvest bucket is a clear plastic hose resulting in the hole that the larvae fall down would be a bright point during the day. This presumably would keep the larvae away and hence I do not see any self-harvesting throughout the day.

So, I have covered the pipe in aluminium foil as in the photo below, to see if they would then self-harvest during the day.

Will post the results after a few days observation.

Good stuff Nigel, looks like beer back on me, I still have maggots and dead flies in my pod so cross 6312 of the list faye for now

I'm posting some up to Jessy next week. Will be an interesting experiment to see if we can start up new populations !

Well, it doesn't appear to change anything. Have checked the harvest pod at the end of the day for 3 days now and there are no BSF in it. Yet, they are still there every morning !

Presumably there's too much light coming in through the top for them to start climbing the ramp.

I guess it makes sense for a fat juicy maggot like that to only come out at night when the birds are sound asleep.

yeah EB, I think you're right - few million years of evolution getting in my way.

Oh well - always fun to test these things. Don't need to harvest them during the day anyway, was just checking to see if there was any potential as a daytime auto-feeder.

This is this morning's harvest.

The number of house/blow fly maggots present is definitely decreasing as predicted/hoped

You may not be able to tell that looking back at some of the other photos as I generally took the photos after I had separated them out. In earlier harvests, the ratio was around 1:1 (housefly:BSF)

Jessy - these are some of the ones I'm sending up to you.

Hey thank Chilli, muchly appreciated, but I was thinking that keeping them fridge might be a bad idea, and news paper, or a paper bag in a cupboard would be much better, since they don't like the cold, it would probably kill them. Thanks a bunch