hi it's time from green Schwartz it's time to set up my simple bee SFL composting bin stay tuned I've got this in a nice spot back here in the backyard got a little bit of a tilt here so that the rain water will run off this side of the roof and we're going to set this up using some food waste from a local restaurant because I've got multiple composters going now I'll have to solidify larva composters as well as a couple worm composters the food waste that my family generates is not enough to sustain all these guys so I've actually go across the street to a local restaurant and get their food waste the beauty of solitary larvae is that they will scale to the amount of food that's available so you make more they make more so this food waste has a little bit of garbage in it just because they didn't presort it for me this time usually they will do that for me and I don't have to deal with sorting out all of the plastic and straws and and skewers so let me do that right now as you can see a soldier fly has already found the bin of course it helps that my other bin is about 5 feet away normally I use a plastic glove to do this sorting if I have to but you can also use a grocery bag and I just used it to move some worms into my worm composter which is why it's messy so you just want to make sure that it doesn't have any holes in it where you're gripping it but if you ask your restaurant ahead of time then presort their food waste for you you found the deal with this top burgers in here got chicken got some bacon lemons are okay for the soldier file are but you don't want to use don't want to use lemons or citrus in a worm composter I pulled the wooden skewers out also the straws come out yeah there are gonna be some happy maggots here in just a few minutes here select apply now all right I'll get any more trash that can find later once the they expose it there's an adult alright they're looking for a place to lay eggs you see the house flies have found it as well they'll probably get started in their egg laying and then the solidified lava will take over I'm gonna help that process out by seeding this with larvae from my other bin whenever I handle sorta for a larva I'm gonna borrow a glove here you can see that was working down here it's gonna grab a handful of maggots here ooh they're wiggling in there move this over to and you've been let's get a few more note that this adult female is not gonna lay eggs on the compost itself she's gonna find a little crevice up on the edge of the tarp or between the tarp in the our plastic there to lay her eggs the eggs will hatch and then they'll crawl down into the compost these soldier flies have found this so quickly just because I've already got I've been nearby and if you're starting from scratch they may have a little harder time finding it but they will and usually what you'll see is house fly larvae coming first and they will lay their eggs they'll hatch and house flower look like grains of rice and they will go a lot faster slowly to fry larvae look more like aliens they're segmented their their movements are a lot more rhythmic corrugated cardboard also provides the perfect crevice for a female soldier fly to lay her eggs so I'm gonna put some of this strategically around the bin so that they can find this and lay eggs in here puts them up here on the back and then also just gonna lay some here right on the front when I close this down their spots right there to lay eggs in part of my reason for leaving the ends open was to allow access for the adults just like we see her doing right now lying right in of course that corrugated is right there ready for her to lay eggs in I've had a problem with ants getting into the bin my other bin so I've just created a simple water gap on each leg using just a variety of things a head around the yard prevent the ants from crossing that gap as long as there's nothing else touching the bin so the setting up my soldier fly larvae bin is just that simple of course the construction is a little more involved and you can watch the build video by clicking on the link above but I also thought I'd take this time to show you how my bin sort of starts up in the spring so from the time it starts to get warm enough that solid fry larvae that have been in stasis over the winter start to hatch out and they come back to the bin because they can find it from the remnants that were left from the previous season so here take a look at this footage is to show you what to see or what to look for in your soldier for a lot of our composting bins as they warm up and start up again in the spring so it's been a few days since I let these guys get going and you can see that they've done a lot of work on this food waste I want to get my hands in there you can also see that there's some pretty serious egg masses over here on the side and here's some babies crawling for the compost there's more up there too that are crawling in one of the challenges that this design is a one I'm laying eggs over here because that means these guys can't actually climb down into the compost so let me move these eggs over to here so these eggs right here will get in just fine but the ones that are over here across this gap will have a difficult time so though they're plenty here to get the job done I'm also seeing that we have some harvested down here in the bin I can't really see what's happening here in the black one but at least in the blue one over here I can see that their pipe out a couple hundred in there one of the problems I'm having right now with this particular bin is ant infestation the fire ants are getting in here and they don't necessarily it won't eat this soldier fly larvae when they're big I'm not sure I haven't seen them carrying off the little ones so I don't know for sure if that's a problem but I just don't want a potential competitor inside the composter with the soldier fly larvae so what I'm gonna do is just start up my new composter I'm going to move a lot of this stuff over from this one and then I'm gonna clean this out wash it down and then restart it also had carpenter ants getting in here they're mainly after the bread so I transferred a bunch of the eggs to this Magnolia leaf and I'm just gonna let that sit right there and once they start to crawl off they'll hop right down into the end of the compost all right see what we got a couple days later here unload the bins so let's check here to do one hand in here but we got the other side open a lot more in this side spiders love to build webs down in here and then they can catch any adults that hatch out so every couple days I need to clear the spider webs out and if I can catch the spider too and relocate him or her all right so it's a few hours later it's night and I'm back out to check on soldier flies see if we have any migrating few more get more down in there from this afternoon and I emptied them I also wanted to check out the bread I put in here this afternoon the remnants of my bread bowl lunch and I just easily just carefully pull this back and show you what's underneath this is I can feel some heat coming off this there definitely this is the frenzy and then getting moving cover them back up let them do their thing just put this bin back in so there's nothing in there yet doesn't look that these guys have hatched yet that should be soon still have my ant problem here yeah fire ants are cohabitating here with the soldier fly larvae but I definitely don't want that happening just because they're competing for food I found out about soldier fly larvae by accident I had a worm composting bin it was outside and I started seeing these creatures in there and I didn't know what they were I at first tried to separate them from the worms by hand and they just came back and I did some research and found out that they were actually black soldier fly larvae and that they were also an amazing composter Marie Hallam who is an aquaponics guru from Australia uses them as a food source for his aquaponics fish I feed him to my goldfish and then of course they're going next door to my neighbor's chickens an amazing food source like 30% fat 40% protein they even have some mitochondria stuff happening that adds antimicrobial properties to a chicken's diet I don't know the details on that but there's some amazing research that's been done on black soldier fly larvae the adults don't even have mouths so they were clearly made to compost and then move and replicate as fast as possible amazing creatures and it's awesome to watch so I've got a bucket over here and it just took out of the other bin I'm gonna walk next door and feed the chickens and I'll show you how that looks here's the output of a about four days of what my composter is doing right now you can see that these are all black which means they're pre pupa when they get to this stage they actually they have crawled out on their own from the compost and it makes it super easy to capture them and to let them do as much work composting as possible all right let's take these guys next door and watch the chickens munch as long as this bin stays dry they cannot climb this sides as soon as it gets wet they can have the surface tension needed to climb up the side of this bin and get out I've had that happen before they're starting to recognize me Hebert's [Applause] [Laughter] the first time I brought these over they weren't sure what to do they're very tentative about eating eventually they did and now they know what they're getting they're happy to see me so they'll get down into the bedding here on the ground the birds are made to scratch these things out so I'm guessing I had five hundred thousand there and they'll eat them all in about ten minutes this is the perfect weight and protein to the chickens diet and that right they have about finished off those larvae it's just a few left that they'll have to scratch to get I wanted you to see the final result and their reasons for the fact that I compost with soldier fly larvae because it allows me to complete the cycle so from food waste food consumption food waste then capturing that waste turning it into solidified lava which then become food for chickens and actually have a great little bargain here with my neighbors I give them bugs and they give me eggs now these guys are these ladies aren't laying just quite yet but they should be laying here in a month or two and then I get to enjoy the bounty of my neighbor's chickens as always our mission here at Green Schwarz is to help you see green so you can be green and save a little green by doing it yourself in this case I'm saving money on eggs by composting with soldier fly larvae and turning them into food for these chickens thanks so much for watching please like and share and subscribe for a new green shorts DIY video almost every Friday ah