What is Gnome doing? He is always trying his hand at something new. This time, he is working on breeding black soldier flies (Hermetia illucens, if you are into Latin naming) for their grubs in order to feed the ducks. In our experience, ducks seem like to eat high protein foods including bugs, larvae, small frogs, frog spawn and small fish. They will preferentially eat these over vegetable scraps, grains and plant material. Since we have them fenced in now and they can’t go ranging far and wide, Gnome has decided to try breeding black soldier flies.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of these flies…basically they are long and black with big, beady black eyes (Yes I know, what a terrible description…if you are interested, please go look it up!!). The females like to lay around composting areas (this is perfect for getting rid of kitchen scraps and plant material);they can lay around 200 to 600 eggs at one time. Once hatched, the larvae drop into the compost and start to eat it up. Within about a week, there are fresh larvae and pupae to be harvested for food. The larvae are the ones still wriggling around and the pupae are the cocoons…technically it doesn’t matter to the ducks…they are happy to eat both. I suppose the pupa are bigger so you might want to wait longer to collect these big, fat juicy grubs. This was Gnome’s first attempt at a black soldier fly breeding area. It was made out of an old plastic container:
The container was designed so that the pupae and larvae would crawl towards the pointy end and fall into a harvesting bucket. Here are some pictures of the juicy duckie tit-bits:
This first design was a bit too small to hold all our compost, so he made a new container out of wood:
The compost is placed in the middle. When the grubs are ready, they start crawling towards the sides…this container allowed them to move to either end…and then drop into a bucket.
The sand is placed in the bin to allow the grubs to have a good grip as they move to the end holes. Without the sand, they are prone to slipping back down into the middle area and then have to start the slow crawl back to the ends…believe me, it was quite tedious watching them slide back down and start again!! This size of breeding bin gives you about 1lb of grubs when it is working well. It works optimally in dry weather. Despite it having a protective roof, when it rains heavily, water can get into it and drown the grubs. Approximately 1lb of these grubs can feed about 3 to 4 ducks adequately. We have 10 ducks so Gnome is looking to build two more of these to supply all the protein that our ducks need. So, still no rest for Gnome…two more containers to build!
The ducks love these grubs and like to pick through them in a container of sand:
