As if I am not busy enough with so many calls, BH visits, report preparation, conversion of shop houses into BH, revamp of semi finished BHs, organizing seminars, looking after visitors, setting up of insect barn, installation of mobile insect generating unit, update my blog, face book (harrykok) and many many more.
Today received a very interesting call from a BH owner who recently completed a four stories BH and each floor is about 14,000 square feet.
"Pak Harry, I need some help. Can you arrange to meet me in Butterworth next week? I need some professional advise on how to get my newly launched BH populated."
I look forward to meet him on Tuesday to see what I can help with his unusual problem with an unusual sized BH.
Anyway before I get more details about his interesting story let me show you something that I have been working on.
Been carrying out some tests on the insect generating powder in a BH in Kepong, Selangor.
The latest findings are as follows:
1) It is better to start the insect generation in stages.
When those insects are little in numbers you will find that the amount of insect generating powder might be too much. Good example: if you are about to start the insect breeding you purchased say 5 kg of the insect generating powder. It is better for you to find a way to get those starter insects. The method that i recently wrote to one of my client is as follows:
"Well I have been waiting for your mail about this matter.
What you need to do will be as follows:
Do not mix the insect powder yet.
Go to the wet market and see if you can buy a few (5-10 pieces) of a very ripe pineapple. Yes the very ripe and those that the seller wanted to throw away.
One unit is about 50 cent.
get 10 of them.
Take them home and cut them into small pieces.
Put the cut pineapple into a resoanable size container and sprinkle with some water (about one litre plus).
Now get some yeast powder, about 200 grams, from any bakery shop or supermarket (making cakes section).
Sprinkle the yeast powder on the wet cut pineapples.
Now take this container to the back of your house and put it at one corner perhaps on a chair.
Let it be fermented and turn into wine.
While doing so come and see if there are any fruit fly coming from the air to drink those juicy wine and start to lay their eggs.
Continue until you see lots of these fly inside the container.
If I were you try to cover the container mouth with those see thru plastic and open some hole to allow these fruit fly to enter and lay their eggs.
Within a few days you will see more and more insects inside the container and at one time there will be lots of maggots inside the wine.
Once they are about 200 to 500 of these maggots plus the flying insect you are ready to start your insect generating mixing.
Can you try and see if it works.
The fruit fly comes from those drains or rubbish bins.
They help us to clear those rubbish.
Hope you will have a fun time.
Harry"
Once you have this done and there are lots of those fruit flies around you can now start mixing your insect powder.
Try to do it in stages. The first batch about 1.5 - 2 kilograms and after the first 10 days you might want to increase to about 3-5 kilograms of those powder.
The reason being if there are little number of flies you will only waste those insect powder.
2) Those fruit flies have some kind preferences.
We don't actually know much about those fruit flies behaviours.
If seems that they do have a kind of preference in choosing which containers to lay their eggs.
If you have started one set you will see that some containers have more maggots than the others.
I am of the opinion that these fruit fly do have a kind of liking to those that are well fermented and with the right viscosity.
Beside the above the temperature and darkness do play some part in making their selection.
3) They tend to stand on their head.
If you bring a magnifying glass you might be able to see some interesting phenomena how these maggots eat the insect powder soup.
Most of them eat with their head down to the bottom.
Incredible eating upside down.
4) The wetness of the soup do affect those maggots.
There will be a few of those soup containers got dried faster than the rest.
As the got dried you might be able to see that those that are a little dry but not totally dried will have nothing much on the top layer.
If you peel the top layer those maggots are hiding at the bottom.
You might be able to see lots of those air vents for their breathing.
If you pour water on these semi harden cake, within a few minute you will see many maggots starts to gather at the wet area.
They are either thirsty or maybe wanted to breath some air.
5) Try not to throw away the used soup/cake.
Once the soup or cake have been in operation for about 40 days or more you might want to replace them with new soup.
My advise to you is not to throw away these food.
Try to place them into a bigger container that like a dustbin.
Put it inside the insect generating room and maybe wet them with water.
You will be surprised that within a few days there will be a lot of insect from these "waste" bin.
To us it might be a waste product but to those insects they are still food.
6) Provide the maggots with something to cling to.
When their time to be in maggots stage is up they need to craw out of the soup (usually) and find a dry place and cool place to transform into pupa.
You might see a lot of these pupa sacks at the base of your containers.
What I want to suggest is to consider putting something into the container example a pvc pipe about 1 foot long.
The pipe is for those maggot to migrate and transform.
7) Get some bucket of water.
I think it is proper to put about two to three buckets of water inside the insect generating room.
Those flying insect do need to drink.
If there is no water they might be thirsty and might fly away to some other place thus will not lay their eggs inside your newly prepared soup.
Hope you enjoy reading some of these discoveries and ideas !!!!
For more details write to harryswiftlet@yahoo.com or simply call 0177551318
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