Feeding time!
To mimic the normal treatment Venus flytraps receive in the home, I caught a few flies today and fed them to each of our test plants. Regular house flies were used. I used a pair of tweezers to place the flies in the traps and quickly removed the tweezers as the trap closed. The flies were 4-5 mm in length.
The video below is of the tap water plant being fed. This particular fly caused many problems for us, as it kept launching off before I could grab it with the tweezers. However some deft tweezer saved the day and the plant eventually got fed! For information about manual feeding of flies, please visit our ‘manual feeding‘ page.
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sharukh responded on 07 Apr 2008 at 8:06 pm #
cool! I have one question though; what if you cant find any flies or insects? and if the traps are starting to get black and die, do i force it into dormancy?
Email me please on this topic!!!Thankyou
Ryan responded on 09 Apr 2008 at 12:14 am #
If you can’t find any bugs, then you could try buying some from a petshop. Some petshops even stock maggots which are great to use.
Otherwise don’t worry about it. Your plant will survive fine with no bugs.
The only reason to place your plant into dormancy is if it is approaching winter. The amount of bugs your plant is catching shouldn’t affect this at all.