What I was doing those 24 months ago then was an experiment, trying to raise Spikes for fish bait differently than "normal" if there is such a thing. Will get to that in a minute.
It's rather easy to raise them quickly by the thousands as I have done quite often in past years, the only problem is what they are raised on. I would commonly bring home a mess of fish, filet them and toss the remains into a plastic pail which was set out in the very back of the yard for a day or two with the lid off to allow flies access to lay eggs. It was then covered with a piece of old cloth to keep other flies out. All the larvae that hatched would then stay pretty much the same size and are killer panfish and catfish bait.
Well I say the same size but there were what I would call big ones and small ones. It was clear that there must be different flies laying eggs during the time there was access. A bit of research determined that the big ones I was after were the larvae of the Blue Bottle Fly, Calliphora vomitoria.
There is a United States supplier of Blue Bottle Fly products, Forked Tree Ranch, Inc. in Idaho. They sell live spikes for bait and flies as pollinators as well as feeder mealworms. Since I could not figure how to isolate my gut bucket to only allow the one species of fly in, I decided to order some and try my experiments.
The Blue Bottle Fly is also called the blow fly, meat fly and probably a few other names I'm not aware of. They are great pollinators for some types of garden plants which is a great thing but they reproduce on dead meat, the stinkier the better for them, to the disgust of most of the rest of us. I wanted to see if they could be raised on something a little less stinky and I actually did succeed to a point or I would not be writing this article.
I built a cage type enclosure of wood and vinyl window screen with a double screen door of sorts. My spikes arrived and were placed into an open bowl in the cage where they pupated and eventually hatched out as flies.
What does one "feed" a fly? I figured they must need some water source so I supplied a dish of wet sawdust with some sugar added which they seemed to be utilizing. How to get them to breed and lay eggs? Well, they seemed to not have trouble in breeding which started almost immediately. How to get them to lay eggs? That's the problem.
Not so much a problem as described earlier if one uses rotting meat or fish parts. My only other thought at the time was moistened dry dog food which I had witnessed maggots in at previous times when a container had carelessly been left uncovered at work and gotten wet where I care for the stray city dogs. At least it doesn't smell as bad as dead meat. The maggots raised on rotten meat or fish smell horrible, no matter how much sawdust one puts them into after feeding them up big and fat. I just can't imagine people eating them.
So I moistened some dog food and put a dish in with the flies. They did what flies do and laid eggs in the dog food which hatched out quickly into maggots.
My experiment was short lived. I did not know how many eggs had been laid in the short amount of time I gave them for a small number of flies. There were maggots and they grew to a good size, about 3/4" long and fat, just not very many, perhaps a couple of hundred into a large mass of dog food I had transferred them into and finding them was a big mess. I had imagined a huge wriggling mass such as a fish gut bucket where there is nothing but solid maggots rolling around each other and having to give them more food. The other problem I had was gnats that had also gotten into the mixture and also laid eggs and pretty much messing up the whole purpose of my trials.
Let's wrap this up. I suppose what I'm getting at is that Blue Bottle Fly larvae can be raised on other things than rotting meat or fish. What those things may be remains to be seen but it will have to be in an enclosed, controlled environment to keep the species isolated. Perhaps something can be discovered such as will be more acceptable to our senses as a food source.
If I'm not mistaken, fly larvae have among the highest amount of protien of any insect or larvae and they have no hard exoskeleton. Some people eat them already. I think the Blue Bottle Fly deserves more experimenting with. To my current knowledge they produce the largest larvae of any common fly and in large numbers quickly if left to their own devices in nature. Can we domesticate them as a palatable human food?
Another fly larvae that deserves our attention as Entomophagists is the Black Soldier Fly Larvae (BSFL). These fly larvae will eat any non-cellulosic food such as fruit pulp and vegetable wastes and are currently being utilized in restaurant refuse and waste treatments. Its larvae is large, even larger than the Blue Bottle Fly. It is not a pest fly to humans and does not invade, infest homes or transmit any known diseases to humans that I'm aware of and will even "self harvest" by crawling away from the food source to pupate, such behavior has been successfully utilized in the commercially manufactured and sold "Bio-Pod". If personally given a choice to raise and eat fly larvae, it would probably be the BSFL.
There will surely be more to come from this writer concerning fly larvae in future articles.
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments are moderated prior to posting.