If you just brought home a box of peeping fluffybutts and you already grow black soldier fly larvae, you are probably looking at your bin and looking at the brooder and wondering if the two go together. I get it. The grubs are right there, they are loaded with protein, and the chicks obviously want to eat anything that moves. So can baby chicks eat black soldier fly larvae, and if they can, when do you start.
The short version is yes, chicks can eat BSFL, and most of mine have gone after them like it was the best day of their lives. But baby chicks are not just tiny chickens, they have some real limits that a full grown hen does not, and if you skip past those limits you can actually cause a problem. So let me walk through how I think about it.
First, why BSFL are a good fit for chicks
Black soldier fly larvae are the larval stage of Hermetia illucens, and on a dry weight basis they run somewhere around 40% protein and roughly 30% fat. That is a lot of protein, which is exactly what a growing chick is building its body out of. Feathers, muscle, all of it needs protein, and their starter feed is formulated to be high protein for that reason.
So the grubs line up nicely with what a chick already needs. They are soft bodied, they move around in a way that triggers all the natural foraging behavior, and my chicks learn to hunt them almost immediately. Watching a week old chick figure out that the wiggly thing is food is one of the better parts of raising them.
There is one nutrition point worth knowing though, and it is the reason I do not just dump grubs in the brooder. BSFL are unusually high in calcium, much higher than something like mealworms. For a laying hen that calcium is a feature, she is pulling calcium out of her body every single day to build eggshells. A baby chick is not laying anything. Growing birds do not need extra calcium, and there is decent reason to think too much calcium before laying age is hard on their kidneys. I am not a vet and I do not want to overstate it, but it is enough that I keep the grubs as a small part of the diet and let the starter feed do the heavy lifting.
When to start
I have seen people offer tiny treats within the first few days and I have seen people wait a few weeks. I lean toward waiting until the chicks are at least a week or two old before I offer anything other than starter feed. Newly hatched chicks are still figuring out how to eat their actual feed, and I would rather they get solid on that first.
Once they are a couple weeks in and clearly eating well, I will start offering a few grubs. Not a pile. A few. The point at this age is not to feed them, the starter feed is doing that, the point is a little enrichment and letting them practice being chickens.
The two things you cannot skip: grit and portion size
Here is the part that actually matters, and it is easy to miss.
Chicks have no teeth. They grind their food in the gizzard using small bits of grit they swallow. When a chick is eating nothing but starter crumble, it does not need grit, the crumble is fine enough to break down on its own. But the moment you feed anything else, a grub, a bit of greens, anything with more texture, that chick needs chick sized grit available so it can actually digest it. Without grit you are risking an impacted crop, and that is a real problem in a little bird. So before the first grub goes in, make sure there is a small dish of chick grit in the brooder. It is cheap and it removes the whole risk.
The second thing is size. A full grown BSFL can be pretty big relative to a young chick, and I have watched a chick grab one that was honestly too much for it and run around trying to swallow it while the others chased it. If your grubs are on the larger side, use smaller or younger larvae for the little ones, or cut a few in half. As the chicks grow this stops being an issue, but early on I pay attention to it.
How much, and the 90/10 idea
The rule of thumb a lot of chicken keepers use is that treats should stay around 10% of the diet, and complete feed should be the other 90%. For chicks I lean even more conservative than that. Their starter is balanced for growth, and every grub they fill up on is a little less balanced feed they eat. So I think of BSFL for chicks as an occasional thing, a handful between a group of them, not a daily meal.
This is different from how I feed my grown hens, where the grubs can be a bigger and more regular part of things. If you want the full picture on feeding your adult flock, I wrote a separate piece on black soldier fly larvae for chickens that goes deeper on the grown bird side.
Live grubs or dried
For chicks I like live BSFL when I have them. They move, which is half the fun and half the point, and they hold their moisture and their full nutrition. Dried larvae work too and are easier to keep on a shelf, just watch the size thing even more closely since dried grubs do not squish the way a live one does, and again, grit.
If you are growing your own, the great thing is you have a steady supply of live grubs a few steps from the brooder, at basically no cost, out of stuff you were throwing away anyway. That is the whole reason I got into this. If you are not set up yet and want to start growing your own so your flock has free protein for years, that is what the Blue Grub Farms shop is built around.
FAQ
Can newborn chicks eat black soldier fly larvae? I would wait. In the first several days I keep chicks on starter feed only so they get good at eating it. I start offering a few grubs once they are around a week or two old and clearly eating well.
Do baby chicks need grit to eat BSFL? Yes. Once a chick eats anything besides fine starter crumble, it needs chick sized grit to grind it up in the gizzard. Put a little dish of grit in the brooder before you offer the first grub.
How many BSFL can a chick have? Not many. Keep treats to roughly 10% of the diet or less, and for chicks I stay under that. A few grubs shared between a group is plenty. The starter feed should still be the vast majority of what they eat.
Are BSFL better than mealworms for chicks? They are higher in calcium and generally higher in fat than mealworms. The higher calcium is great for laying hens but is a reason to go easy with growing chicks, since young birds do not need extra calcium. Both can be a treat, portion is what matters.
Will feeding grubs make my chicks stop eating their feed? It can if you overdo it. Chicks will fill up on grubs and skip the balanced feed they actually need to grow right. That is the main reason I keep the grubs small and occasional at this age.
Can chicks choke on a black soldier fly larva? A large grub can be too much for a very young chick. Use smaller or younger larvae for the little ones, or halve a few, until the chicks are big enough to handle a full sized grub easily.
So that is how I run it. Starter feed does the real work, grit is in the brooder before anything else goes in, and the grubs are a small handful of enrichment while the little ones learn how to be chickens. They will be big enough to really go to town on them before you know it.
