It’s been over a month since
we merged
our duck and chicken flocks.
How well are they getting
along?
We have not noticed any
fights and they sometimes hang out in the same area, but for the most
part I think they’ve decided to share the playground.
We got our black soldier fly bin going at the end of July,
and for a while, nothing seemed to be happening. Then, somewhere
around the middle of August, the bin contents started becoming
drastically smaller very quickly, which I assumed meant our larvae were
coming up to speed. A couple of weeks later, the first few pupae
popped up in the collection bin, then many more showed up in the bin at
the first of September. Time to try out the tasty morsels on our
flock!
“Delicious!” said the Red
Star who hogged the entire feast, snarfing down all of the pupae within
seconds. The only ones she wasn’t so keen on were the oldest
pupae that I’d forgotten and left in the collection jar for a few
weeks. After looking at my closeup photos as I wrote this post, I
realized those pupae were probably just husks out of which the adult
flies had already emerged. (In the first photo in this post, you
can see one fly that couldn’t find its way out of the collection bin and
perished.)
What have I been putting
in our black soldier fly bin to produce such tasty grubs? Mostly
onion and garlic peels, big cabbage leaves, and carrot tops, all of
which our chickens usually turn up their noses at. However, we did
have one bag of laying pellets go moldy on us due to August’s endless
rain, and I’ve started soaking the pellets and adding them to the bin a
gallon or so at a time. It’s not safe to feed moldy chicken feed
to your flock, but if you feed the pellets to black soldier flies and
then feed the black soldier flies to chickens, your flock will enjoy the
nutrition anyway.
I’m not ready to say that
black soldier fly bins are or aren’t worth the time and expense yet,
but I’m definitely enjoying the experiment…and so is that one sated
hen!
Our ducks will start laying
eggs soon, and we don’t have a duck nest box yet.
The research I’ve done so far
suggests that ducks sometimes lay wherever they get the urge in the
beginning which is why I’m leaning towards a portable design so we can
try different locations if we need to.
I think we’ll try the above
design. It seems to work well for Youtube user Gregory Shaffer and will
be easy to relocate. What kind of nest box do you give your domestic
ducks to lay eggs in?