Are there any ways of providing additional food to those swiftlets staying in your BH?
Yes and there are many many ways of creating those insects as additonal food for your birds.
The best so far is by activating those insect generating powder that are preprepared with a kind of food source and fruit flies eggs.
The moment you mix them with water those eggs will begin to activate thus forming into maggots. These maggots will start to eat and eat and eat until they are fat enought to transform into fruit flies. The moment they reach this stage these maggots will climb to the top part of your containers and begin to pupate into a brown coloured sacs and within hours a young fruit flies will break the shell.
Once that occured these young flies will quickly mate and those inpregnanted lady flies will start laying eggs inside those slurries.
To maximise these laying eggs activities I suggest the use of ripe pinneaples to generate more of these insects.
Get about five to ten ripe pinneaple fruit and cut then into a one inch thick slab. Spred these slabs onto a tray forming a small hill. Get some yeast, bakery yeast, and spread the powder onto these cut pinneaples. You need to place some structure like a cut PVC pipe about 1 foot long at the center of the tray to act as the pupate center. Remember when those fruit flies maggots are full and wanted to pupate they need to climb a structure to begin the pupating activities.
Once that is done let the two works hand in hand. The insect generating powder will creat the young flock of fruit flies and these young flies will mate and lay their eggs on the fermented pinneaples.
Please replace the pinneaples once every three to four weeks.
The insect generating slurry can last for at least 4 to 5 months. After they turn color (into black) you need to activate a new batch.
Read these old links that I wrote sometime back:
http://swiftletfarming.blogspot.com/2008/05/you-can-generate-insects-by-using.html
http://swiftletfarming.blogspot.com/2008/04/insect-powder-usage-progress.html
One other interesting method that you might consider is to breed honey bees on your BH rooftop.
They are not very difficult to breed but you need to take a good number of hours a week to look after them.
The best is to order the bee house together with the queen bees and usually the queen will attract other bees to join her colony.
If you do have a big garden then you can firstly multiply the colony. Once the colony is sizable enough you might want to move them up onto your BH rooftop.
Nowadays you can easily buy the bee breeding sets online.
I was on AirAsia the other day and came across an article on how your can order these bee breeding sets direct from UK.
One set is only 495 plus 20 (freight) pound sterling.
Go to http://www.omlet.co.uk
I have yet to consider this but why not !!!!
If you have difficulties in bring the gadget in then you might want to meet the king of bee breeder that I recently met in Sabah.
He brings in crates of these wild bees into Sabah every year.
He might be your last resort......
Donation: I am sure you have learned something after reading this article. If you feel that the lesson learned deserved an encouragement you can contribute a some donation to this account: Yayasan Kebajikan Nah Sabah, 100930010038410 at Allied Bank, Malaysia.
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