Because maggots live on food scraps, females will choose a place with the largest amount of food to increase the chance that her offspring will survive.
Therefore, any area with a large amount of food scraps such as a compost pile of a large dumpster would distract the female from laying her eggs in the pod.
When eggs are laid outside fo the pod, they are not a part of our BSF colony, and the maggots are not in the pod to create the synonome. Nor can we increase the size of our colony or conduct experiments to determine the number of maggots needed to reduce a pound of food scraps in one hour (for example).
Because of this, when we first did a survey of UBC Farm, we looked for distractions. Although there was a large green dumpster as well as a compost bin nearby (about 50 meters away), we did not consider them to be worrisome since BSF are weak fliers and we thought they would prefer to stay close to the pod and would be attracted by the synonome.
However, because we have seen 2 gravid (pregnant) females but no eggs in the pod (yet!), we now consider the dumpster and compost pile to be worrisome distractions especially since we now only have about half of our maggots left, creating only half of the synonome.
Therefore we have decided to move the pod further from the dumpster and compost pile and hopefully will see the desired result- eggs.
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