Venus Flytrap Growing

Most people feed their Venus flytraps with flies. Those disgusting little bugs that buzz everywhere and are generally a nuisance are both a good size and nutrient level for your plant. However there are issues with feeding flies to your plant including:

• they’re hard to get into the trap without killing them first
• if you place them in with a pair of tweezers you need to forcefully wrench the tweezers out which risks damaging your plant
• They leave a hideous carcass behind
• Catching them is difficult

Maggots on the other hand have none of the above problems. They’re easy to get into the trap, just pick them up and drop them, they leave no carcass behind as their squishy bodies are almost entirely digested by the trap and they’re slow moving so are easy to catch.

Of course maggots don’t generally live around the home unless you happen to live in a cesspool, in which case I suggest turning your computer off and cleaning your house from top to bottom right now! If you don’t live in a cesspool and are planning to feed your Venus flytrap with maggots you are either going to have grow your own, track down a rotting piece of meat covered in them or buy some. Maggots can often be purchased at pet shops or fishing supplies stores.

Growing your own maggots is pretty easy though. Just get a small jar, place a piece of meat in there (chicken works good) and leave it outside for a while. Eventually a few flies will land on it, leave them there for a few hours to make sure they’ve done their thing (laying eggs) at which time you should get the flies out of there (shaking the jar usually works). Pour a little water inside, or add some wet cotton wool and put a lid on it with a few holes punched in the top. After about a week you should have some nice healthy looking maggots growing in some gooey sludge. Scoop the maggots out, wash them with a little water to get the smelly rotten meat off and take them to your plant. Gently place the maggots in the center of one of the traps and they’ll usually trigger the trap immediately. The trap will close around the maggot and voila, it’s feeding time  About a week later your trap will open and magically there will be no dead carcass! At most there will be a shiny looking gleam on your trap.

Some people claim to have found that their maggots crawl out of the trap so they have held them inside the trap with a toothpick, however I have never personally had any troubles with just dropping them in. In fact even when they move, they usually move towards the middle of the trap which lets the leaves clamp totally shut, encasing the maggot inside the trap ready to be digested.

Maggots are my preferred food for my flytraps due to the ease of feeding and the lack of yucky bug skeletons. However growing/finding maggots is a rather disgusting activity and not something I recommend doing if bad smells bother you a lot. I grow and process my maggots in a smell proof fume hood in my lab, so the grossness factor isn’t so bad for me. But growing maggots at home is likely to be a rather unpleasant affair and you may be better of purchasing them.

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.

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.

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.