About Black Soldier Flies

Background

I discovered Black Soldier Flies ('BSF') almost 5 years ago when I was researching organic farming practices.  I came across a paper Using the Black Soldier Fly, Hermetia illucens, as a Value-Added Tool for the Management of Swine Manure, written by entomologist and animal and dairy PhDs at the University of Georgia and North Carolina State University.

I knew about earthworms "eating" food waste (they don't really eat food waste); but had never heard about BSFs. 

I immediately saw the commercial possibilities for handling factory farm manures and food waste.

Since then, I've read every scientific paper I could find, books, articles, talked with fellow BSF growers, to learn about these fantastic creatures. 

Our earth is an amazing organism.  Everything is recycled.  In the natural course of things, every plant and animal becomes, at some point, food for something else. 

The most used methods right now to recycle food waste are composting and anaerobic digesters.  Both use nature as well. Good composting is where the materials have the right carbon/nitrogen mix and you let natural bacteria, fungi, and actinomycetes do their thing -- they break down the materials.  Link about Composting

Digesters use specific species of bacteria to eat the waste in a non-oxygen environment.  As the bacteria eat the food, they produce methane, which can be used for energy production.

Both of these methods are good, but have their drawbacks.  Composting can take months to break down the material.  Digesters are very finicky systems, expensive to set up and run. 

Most of us have seen the horror movies were the rotting corpse has maggots feasting away.  Disgusting.  Horrifying.  Nasty.  Well, essentially, that's what BSF larvae are.  It isn't horrifying or nasty -- it's a very important part of nature's cycle. 

BSF larvae eat just about anything.  They can't eat cellulose.  If you give them a piece of meat, they will eat all the soft bits, and leave the network of connective tissue.  They do the same with a leaf of lettuce -- all the soft part of the leaf is eaten, with the web of the leaf structure left.  The don't care if it's raw or cooked, has fungus, mold or is rotten.  However, BSF can't handle anaerobic conditions (no oxygen).

Black Soldier Fly Life Cycle

Larvae - BSF spend most of their active life as larvae.  When they hatch out, they are tiny little specks.  They crawl from where the egg cluster is to the nearest food.  From then on, all they do is eat, eat, eat.  BSF larvae can eat twice their weight in a day and they can go from a tiny speck to almost an inch long within 2-3 weeks.  The larvae hate the light.  They can handle wet conditions.  They love it hot -- 80 degrees Fahrenheit is good, but 90-100 is even better!

Pupation - As the larvae reach maturity, they go from a light cream color to dark brown.  They start hunting for a dark, dry place to pupate.  Once in pupation, they are still.  Inside they are busy turning into a fly.  When they become a fly, they chew a whole in their old outer skin, and emerge into the world.

Fly - When they are adults, their mission is to mate and lay eggs.  The males stake out a territory and defend it against other males.  The female will mate, the next day lay an egg cluster of 300-600 eggs, then die.  The male will live 6-8 days.  During their adult lives they don't eat.  The adults like hot, humid conditions.

Using BSF for Food Waste Recycling

There are two significant benefits to using BSF for food waste recycling:

1.  The BSF will eat the food immediately.  If you have enough BSF larvae for the food waste to be recycled, it can "disappear" in a day.  The BSF will leave some of the food waste behind.  The tough parts of foods:  fruit rinds, potato skins, connective tissues get left.  The BSF activity actually generates heat.  The "leavings" mixed with the BSF poo quickly becomes a compost-like material.

2.  What the BSF larvae can be turned into.  The larvae body is composed of 32% oil and 43% protein.  The oil is suitable as a stock for biodiesel; the protein is suitable for agricultural feeds like fish meal.

The Core of Our Research and Development

During the next two years, we will be working on the following:

1.  Growing our BSF population to commercial size.  Our goal is to work on our fly-breeding process and get a self-sustaining population that can process one ton of food waste a day.

2.  Testing our prototype equipment. 

3.  Test our larvae-rendering equipment and process.

There are other things we will be working on in parallel to the BSF research and development, but this is the core of our business model.