Firstly, Venus flytraps are carnivorous. However, this does not mean that they can eat any old thing you decide to stick in it. You can not feed it any of the following:
- McDonalds
- Chocolate
- Human flesh - gross!
- Steak
- Bread
- Fish
- Chicken
- Chips/fries
- Vegetables
- plus most other things
Venus flytraps have evolved to consume only bugs. They’re very picky and if you feed them anything else they won’t like it. The best bugs to use are soft squishy bugs without super strong exoskeletons (too hard to digest). Ants and slaters are bad due to their hard exoskeletons and moths are too fuzzy to digest. Some of the best bugs to use are:
- flies
- crickets
- cicadas
- caterpillars (be careful they don’t eat their way out though!)
- spiders
It is crucial that you don’t feed your plant anything bigger than about 1/4 the size of the leaf, any bigger and you risk damaging the plant or the plant rejecting the bug. If you’re careful you can go up to about 1/2 the size of the leaf but be careful.
Maggots are good food too, but that’s a topic for another post.
So your plant isn’ catching enough flies? Or perhaps you are never around when it does. At any rate, at some point you may wish to catch flies to feed directly to your plant.
Fly Spray?
The simplest way to catch flies is to spray some fly spray around, this works great and any flies in a locked room will usually die within 10 mins or so with some regular household variety fly spray from your local super market. However … remember that the fly must move inside the trap or your plant will just spit it back out again. So you’ll either need to wriggle the plant around manually which risks damaging your plant (not recommended) or find a better fly catching method.
There is another problem associated with fly spray. Venus flytraps are very sensitive to chemicals and do not grow well when it exposed to them. However as long as you aren’t spraying your plants directly they should be able to handle it (in theory - don’t shoot me if your plant dies because of this!). The amount of fly spray needed to kill a fly is negligible, it is more likely to do you harm than your plant and they are designed to kill insects and pretty much nothing else. You are also making your plant a lot less likely to kill flies by itself if you get fly spray near it. Of course this doesn’t matter if you aren’t spraying anywhere near where your plant lives and you intend to hand feed it for the rest of it’s life.
Swatter
If you are going to stun the little buggers then you’d better make sure you don’t hit them too hard. Swatting is a risky practice and you’re liable to kill them before they even reach your plant.
Jar Trapping
There’s two approaches to ‘jar trapping’. You can either run around like an idiot winging your arms wildly trying to capture them, or you can stick a bit of rotting meat inside and leave it outside till they come to visit. Either way, all you need to do is stick the lid on and whammo you have a nice fly ready for feeding to your plant 
‘Jar trapping’ is certainly the most recommended method of capturing flies as it doesn’t damage them during the process.
Cultivation
The cultivation of flies will be part of seperate post coming soon to flytrapgrowing.info.
Aside from the yuck factor, if you are skilled enough to catch a fly with your bare hands then you will be able to catch the little morsels of food whenever you see them. Years of video game playing and analysing the behaviour of flies will likely help, but if it’s too late for that then here is a handy list of tips which I learned from tygerland.net.
Stationary fly catching
- attack from behind
- don’t close your hand by smacking the fingers and palm together as you will likely make a mess
- instead close your hand tightly and quickly but leave a tight channel for the fly to fit inside
Mid-air fly catching
- you must have patience, speed and vision
- catch the fly where it is going, not where it is otherwise you will miss
- watch it, learn it’s path and flight style
- move your hand quickly from the shoulder outwards to the point of connection
- use the same hand closing technique as for stationary flies
- anticipate the fly’s direction and velocity so that you meet it a 5 cm or so from where it was when you began your attack
- ideal distance for closure is just before the arm straightens
- practice, practice, practice!
And before you ask, no I don’t catch flies with my hands, yuck! And if you do follow this advice, make sure finish up by washing your hands.