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Thesis on on Acari (mites) in industrial insect production.
Hi!
I am currently working on a thesis looking into what issues there are with Acari (mites) in insect production. Looking around on the internet I found a surprisingly small amount of information on how producers deal with pests such as grain mites and mold mites in production. This should be an issue considering the high humidity levels in production combined with substrate such as wheat bran. Does anyone here have knowledge regarding this? Maybe you have experienced it yourself or perhaps you have read something that I have not. Everything is accepted with open arms!
Thanks.
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6 Replies
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Hi,
What insect species are you looking at?
Here at Inagro we have had problems in the past with mites in our Tenebrio rearing that can explode in a matter of days. However, they were quite easy to control/eradicate when the ventilation increased combined with a slightly lower humidity.
I do read a lot of issues at small scale, at home colonies on the different FB groups. I do assume most are related to a lack of ventilation and therefore high humidity micro climate.
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Thank you for the response! Yes I am focusing on Tenebrio. Okay, interesting, so you simply increased ventilation to where you have your Tenebrio? Did you read this in an article somewhere or was it “common sense” in your opinion?
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I’ve experienced issues with mites as well.
Dry feed left out to long got infected and so did our frass (bsf production). It did not seem to interfere of affect anything negatively in the production, but we changed our handling methods to reduce the occurrence.Our guess was that it was Acarus siro, but we never got it confirmed.
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Thank you for the response! Did you also increase ventilation? I wonder if the same procedure for dealing with it can be done for BSF and TM. I would guess not considering the more humid nature of the BSF.
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We put more attention toward avoiding having any dry feed or frass sitting around and that reduced the problem significantly. We did not find it necessary to try out more elaborate solutions.
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Hi,
In our case I think somebody told me that mites are more susceptible to dry conditions. It was also quite obvious when assessing the conditions when the mite explosions happened. Always when the ventilation failed or the climate conditions were ‘wrong’ so either increasing the humidity in the entire room or having very humid ‘micro’climate. Therefore the solution was also quite ‘obvious’.
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