New Homesteading Project - Black Solider Fly Bins

I have been playing around with starting a BSF bin for awhile. My main reason before was to be able to convert waste that is not being feed to my worms into a food source for my worms after the BSFL, black solider fly larva, have consumed it and turning it into frass. Here is an article I did on the benefits of frass.

https://steemit.com/gardening/@liberyworms/benefits-of-frass-in-the-garden

The reasons this works well for my worm beds is first it gets the food source threw the heat cycle so my bins don't heat up as bad which is a big help especially here in the summer months. They can also consume things worms can't and at a higher rate. For example trash cans full of citrus, onion peels or meat would not be something I would add into my worm bins but I would toss it into a BSFL bin with no worries and then take the frass produced to feed my worms. It creates a quality food source for my worms from a waste product I would not use otherwise.

It also produces a fantastic very nutritious food source for chickens, pigs or even fish. I remember these being sold back in the day in pet stores as phoenix worms. I get a new micro livestock feedstock, a new quality food source for my worms and a way to dispose of more and different types of organic waste. You can also take the frass and use it directly into your garden if you choose.

Another great this is they work as a cleaning stage. BSFL have a great ability to clean many if not all the pathogens from the feedstock they are eating and if it is going to be added to a worm bin it will go threw another cleaning process with the worms before you get your finished product for planting and growing crops. This is another reason I am going to setup several bins of BSFL because I want to use one bin to clean my butchered boar heads. Instead of letting it rot on a fence post in the sun with flies that carry diseases all around it I want to toss them into my BSFL bins and let them clean all the left over meat off the skulls so then I can sun bleach them and get them ready for sale. This is speed up the process a hundred time faster since BSFL can consume massive amounts of waste in a very short time and they also help clean all the pathogens from the left over product. This will allow me to get my heads and tusk up for sale faster since we will be butchering more and more. I will even use it will my older male goat heads and horn sets for sale.

I am going to cut some IBC totes I have sitting around in half to create several BSFL bins and since we already have the here it should not be to hard to get them to colonize the new bin. One great thing about BSFL is other flies don't populate the same bin once they have established a colony which is great because BSFL don't have mouths so they don't bite and they also don't carry diseases that other flies do. This is great for a homestead because essentially they will start to colonize compost piles or manure piles once established and reduce places for normal flies to populate.

If I did not have free ibc totes to use I would maybe use something smaller and easier to move like the totes I use for my worm food. These are nice and have handles to make them easy to carry but are large enough to be used for a bin.

Setting up BSFL bins here for me is a win win in so many areas and really have no downfall besides the time to setup but I think that should be minimal since I just have to cut a few IBC totes in half and stock with food. That is after I rebuild the hog pallet pens to breed for fall piglets and get some more of the solar hooked up so I'm thinking maybe a few weeks and I should be up and running but I will post the finished bed when I get to that point.