Manual feeding
If you are growing your Venus flytrap outside, then chances are you will never need/want to feed your plant as it will happily catch enough bugs on it’s own. However, if you keep your plant inside and particularly if it is in a terrarium, then chances are it may never catch it’s own prey and you will need to consider manually feeding it There are two main approaches to manually feeding your plant.
Shoving the bug in the trap
You can either poke a bug into the trap with your fingers or a pair of tweezers, this can potential be harmful to your plant as you can damage the surface of the trap with the tweezers or your fingers, however if you are careful this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. The video below demonstrates the process of feeding by tweezers.
Placing the bug near the trap
If you have your plant inside a terrarium, then one of the easiest ways to feed your plant is simply to place a few bugs inside the terrarium and wait for your flytrap to do it’s thing. This removes any risk of you damaging the plant by poking it with tweezers or your fingers. The video below is of a Venus flytrap catching it’s prey the old fashioned way.
Temporary stunning
This is a slightly more time consuming method, but it works quite well. Although you may be able to capture bugs in a jar, you may have difficulty in grabbing hold of a wing, leg etc. to feed them to your plant by. This is a particular problem for flies which can be quite difficult to catch without losing them.
The most common (and usually most convenient) method is to cool the bugs down by placing them in the fridge. This will knock them out (or at least slow them down) so that you can grab hold of them properly.
A more exotic method and that which we use for our own plants here at flytrapgrowing.info, is to stun the bug with chemicals. Do not soak your bug in any random chemical you happen to find as whatever you expose the bug to you will also be exposing to your flytrap! Venus flytraps do not like chemicals so it’s best to avoid exposing them to anything nasty. The most convenient way to stun them with chemicals is to place bug in a jar containing a small amount of diethyl ether, this will very promptly knock out your fly ready for you to grab hold of them, they will wake up approximately 30 seconds later. Do not let your bug touch the diethly ether liquid as it is the fumes which will knockout the bug, not the liquid itself. Exposing the bug to the liquid will kill it which isn’t the aim here (bugs need to be alive to trigger the trap). Diethyl ether is extremely volatile (boiling point of only 30ºC) so the chemicals will quickly evaporate from your plant and cause no damage to it. You could also try other solvents such as acetone, methanol or dichloromethane. Remember to always be careful when handling volatile solvents and follow safety guidelines appropriately.
Once you’ve got hold of them, you can either place them directly into a trap and hope that they’ll wake up shortly and trigger the trap, or keep hold of them until they do wake up then use the same method described above in the “Shoving the bug in the trap” section.
If you can only find dead bugs
Dead bugs are no good for your plant. You must have live bugs to trigger the trap. Not only does the trap need to close, but the bug needs to repeatedly trigger the trap after the initial closure to ensure that the trap does not reopen.
If you are living in some freakishly clean place where no bugs live, or you are just plain lazy and/or need a quick bug eating fix, then make sure that when you drop your dead bug in that you manually manipulate the traps with your fingers for a few minutes afterwards to make sure that the trap did indeed get triggered properly and isn’t going to cough the bug back up after a day. Be very careful not to damage the trap in the process. This is far from optimal however and you really should be feeding it live bugs.
And remember, your plant will normally survive perfectly well with no bugs, so don’t panic if you or your plant can’t find any.
Photo of Venus flytrap digesting a bug courtesy of FlickR2sea and the photo of an already digested fly is courtesy of Ovas.
Bilby responded on 02 Nov 2007 at 3:23 am #
Thanks.
Dont you think stunning them with chemicals is a little drastic? and where do you get diethyl ether from?
Ryan responded on 02 Nov 2007 at 5:22 am #
It is a little drastic for most people, however my Venus flytraps are in a chemistry lab so it’s quite convenient for me.
I have no idea where you can purchase diethyl ether from. Acetone should do the trick quite well though and can be purchased from many different places including pharmacies.
marvin responded on 20 Sep 2008 at 9:28 pm #
Hi,
Do I need to remove the bodies of the dead insect afetr the Venus Flytrap eat it?
Ryan responded on 16 Oct 2008 at 10:11 pm #
Hi marvin,
No you don’t need to remove the bodies, that is optional. I find it quite tricky to remove them as they often stick to the inside of the trap and then when I remove them the trap gets trigger again and they reswallow the bug they just digested
joshua responded on 03 Nov 2008 at 6:27 pm #
I have a venus fly trap at home and i was wondering is it normal for the digesting to take so long? like it wont open and is moths exceptional for the trap?
jerome responded on 01 Apr 2009 at 11:12 am #
can the venus fly trap digest woodlouse??
Aaron responded on 30 Apr 2009 at 11:24 pm #
how come my venus fly trap is not producing new traps? I water it, feed it, And give it sunlight can someone help me?
Ryan responded on 19 May 2009 at 3:07 am #
@joshua – The traps normally digest the bugs and reopen within a week. It isn’t uncommon for them to take weeks to open though, particularly if the plant isn’t healthy.
@Aaron – We need a lot more information before we can answer your question sorry.
Ryan responded on 19 May 2009 at 3:12 am #
@jerome – I don’t know what woodlouse is.
Joe responded on 03 Jul 2009 at 10:14 am #
I fed one of the heads a live fly not too long ago. Within a couple days, the area that contained the fly started turning black, and within a few more days had pretty much died off. A friend of mine said this was normal, but after some reading I disagree. WHat could be causing this an how can I prevent it?