How to breed maggots? A detailed explanation of breeding methods and technical key points
What are maggots? They are the larvae of flies. I believe everyone has seen maggots. Judging by appearance alone, maggots are a rather disgusting little worm, but maggots have high nutritional value, with particularly high protein. Animals fed with maggots have higher nutritional value.
How to breed maggots?
Ferment manure material - send into the maggot house - pile into strips - place egg-collecting material - cover egg masses after laying - maintain moisture and temperature to raise maggots - automatic separation - collect adult maggots - comprehensive utilization - shovel out residual manure - repeat cyclic production.
1. Manure formula and fermentation: Formula 1: fresh pig manure (within 3 days) 70%, chicken manure (within one week) 30%; Formula 2: fresh pig manure from slaughterhouse 100%; Formula 3: pig manure 60%, bean dregs 30%, bran 10%; Formula 4: chicken manure 70%, distillers' grains 30%. Fermentation method: 1 ton of manure material, 20 kg of health liquid, 5 kg of corn flour, mix evenly with the manure material in the fermentation pit, cover with plastic film and seal tightly, and it can be used after 1~3 days of fermentation (shorter in summer, longer in winter).
2. Send the fermented manure material into the maggot house, and pile three strips in each pool, each strip 0.8 m long, 0.2 m wide, and 0.15 m high. The time for adding manure is: 8~9 o'clock every day in winter and spring, and 16~18 o'clock in the afternoon in summer and autumn.
Maggots
3. Place egg-collecting material on the manure piles, three small piles per strip. The formula of the egg-collecting material is: calculated per 100 kg of manure material: 1 kg of wheat bran, 2 liang of fish meal, 3 liang of peanut bran, 1.5 kg of water. After mixing evenly, it can be placed on the manure piles. After placing the egg-collecting material, walking around in the maggot house is prohibited.
4. Under normal circumstances, after the egg-collecting material is placed, flies will gather on the egg-collecting material to lay eggs. At 20 o'clock in the evening, use a small amount of egg-collecting material to cover the egg masses exposed outside, as provided by maggot breeding technology.
5. At room temperature 25~35°C, the egg masses generally hatch into small maggots after 8 hours. At this time, if the manure pile is found to be too dry, sprinkle a small amount of water. The small maggots will first eat the egg-collecting material, then burrow into the manure pile to grow; 24 hours after hatching, the previously neatly piled manure has been scattered by the maggots crawling and eating. At this time, attention should be paid to maintaining the moisture of the manure pile. When the manure pile is found to be dry, water should be added in time. At this time, it is best to use pig pen water treated with health liquid for watering, and the amount of water added is best when no water is seen flowing out of the manure pile; as the maggots continue to grow, the manure pile has become completely loose. 72 hours after the maggots hatch, some maggots that mature first begin to crawl out of the manure pile and fall into the maggot collection bucket. 72~96 hours is the peak period for crawling out. At this time, the manure pile scattered by the maggots should be piled into one large pile twice a day, in order to clean up and keep the scattered manure from blocking the edge of the pool and preventing the maggots from smoothly crawling into the maggot collection bucket. Generally, on the 4th day after adding manure, the maggots in the manure pile have basically all crawled out (a small number that have not crawled out are shoveled out and piled where chickens are raised to let the chickens help clean up the remaining maggots), shovel out the residual manure, and put in newly fermented manure again for cyclic production. At 10 o'clock every morning, it is required to spray all places in the maggot house once with a 50-fold dilution of health liquid, in order to achieve the purpose of eliminating odor and sterilizing.
6. The maggots in the maggot collection bucket should be collected twice a day, at 8 in the morning and 5 in the afternoon. When collecting maggots, first put on a pair of leather gloves, then grab them. Maggots can be directly fed to economic animals without disinfection.
7. A three-dimensional maggot breeding technology house with an area of 40 sq m is required to guarantee more than 300,000 breeding flies, with red-headed flies accounting for 80% and house flies accounting for 20%. On average, every three days when collecting maggots, keep 1 kg of maggots and place them in a dedicated hatching pool or a basin to let them pupate and hatch (pupation takes about 72 hours, and pupae hatch into flies in about 72 hours), to ensure the number of breeding flies. The lifespan of male flies is generally only 7 days, and the lifespan of female flies is generally 15~25 days.
Daily management of maggot breeding
During the feeding process, attention should be paid to daily management work. Every day, promptly do work such as adding breeding fly feed, placing egg-collecting material, and changing drinking water.
At the same time, also record the hatching time of eggs in time, so as to collect eggs in time. After staff leave their posts, clean the floor sanitation of the fly house and maggot breeding house. The feed trays for feeding flies should also be cleaned once every two days, including the sponges. The sponges should be replaced every month.
In addition, house flies are important sanitary pests. In all aspects of feeding and management, controlled rearing work should be done well to prevent the breeding population from entering the natural environment.
With the development of livestock, poultry, and aquaculture industries, the demand for protein feed is also increasing. Breeding maggots has advantages such as a short cycle, high yield, and low cost, and is currently the first choice for producing animal protein feed. Equipping a livestock and poultry farm with a maggot breeding farm is equivalent to building another insect protein feed production plant. Using the manure excreted by livestock and poultry to raise maggots, thereby obtaining high-protein feed, turns waste into treasure and turns harm into benefit. The manure after maggot breeding can also be used as high-quality organic fertilizer for crops, used to grow grain and vegetables. This special conversion function is unmatched by other feed insects.
What is the prospect of maggot breeding?
With the development of livestock, poultry, and aquaculture industries, the demand for protein feed is growing. At present, many countries regard artificial insect rearing as the main direction for solving the source of protein feed. Among feed insects such as maggots, yellow mealworms, and silkworm pupae, maggot breeding is particularly worth mentioning.
Flies reproduce quickly. According to estimates, a pair of flies can breed 200 billion maggots in four months, accumulating more than 600 tons of pure protein. Maggots generally need only 1011 days to develop from egg to adult, and only 45 days from egg to adult maggot, with a short cycle, fast reproduction, and high yield. Newly hatched larvae are 0.08 mg. At 24°C30°C, after 45 days of growth, the body weight of maggots can reach 2050 mg, and the total biomass increases by 250350 times. As lower animals, insects, in the energy conversion of ecosystems, although their assimilation efficiency is about half that of mammals, their production efficiency is 1540 times that of mammals. This is unmatched by any other method of producing animal protein to date. If pigs and cattle also grew at this rate after birth, after 5 days their body weight would reach 325KG and 7500KG respectively. They have omnivorous feeding habits and are especially fond of eating livestock manure. The raw materials for breeding maggots have a wide range of sources. Agricultural and sideline product by-products such as wheat bran, rice bran, distillers' grains, and bean dregs can be used for maggot breeding. What is even more rare is that maggots are extremely fond of eating livestock manure, such as pig manure, chicken manure, and duck manure. Equipping a livestock and poultry farm with a maggot breeding farm is equivalent to building another insect protein feed production plant. The raw material is the manure excreted by livestock and poultry, and the product is high-quality maggot protein feed. Turning waste into treasure and turning harm into benefit, the manure after maggot breeding has no odor, does not attract flies, and is fertile and loose, making it a high-quality organic fertilizer for crops. This special conversion function is unmatched by other feed insects.
Ecological habits of maggots
In order to successfully raise maggots, before breeding, we must first understand their ecological habits. In biology, flies belong to "holometabolous insects", and their life goes through 4 stages: egg, larva (maggot), pupa (fly pupa), and adult (fly).
Among them, the egg stage lasts 1 day, the maggot stage 4~6 days, the pupa stage 3~4 days, and flies become sexually mature 4 days after emergence and begin mating and laying eggs. The lifespan of flies is at most 1 month. In actual production, each batch of breeding flies should be eliminated in time after 20~25 days of rearing. Under artificial breeding conditions, as long as the temperature is suitable, flies can reproduce year-round.
Generally, the common flies we see are mostly red-headed flies and house flies, but compared with red-headed flies, house flies have better adaptability and omnivorous feeding habits, so here we choose to raise house flies. If you are breeding maggots for the first time, it is recommended that you best go to a specialized maggot breeding farm to buy fly seeds. After raising them for a period of time, the fly seeds can be cultivated by yourself.
Although maggots look disgusting, their role in the development of agriculture and the breeding industry cannot be underestimated. Many free-range chickens, free-range ducks, and other livestock mainly grow up eating maggots, and their nutritional value is much higher than that of eating other feed, and they also sell for a higher price. Even the eggs they lay are richer in nutritional value.