How to make a hoverfly lagoon

Attract beautiful hoverflies to your garden by making a stylish and delightfully pungent hoverfly lagoon! Get to meet my rat-tailed maggots :)
Any easy wildlife project for all ages, can be made at any time of year.

[BluePoppy]

Love this idea! I do actually have some rat-tailed maggots in my small pond. My daughters have been fascinated watching them swim about!

[regenerativegardeningwithpatti]

I love your idea. I enjoy the hoverflies in my gardens. Exciting to know we could offer them some habitat. Thank you

[suewright]

Very many thanks indeed for this video Dave, I've already some Rat-taled Maggots in a mini pond in our garden. I had no idea what they were, but will now be taking great care to, hopefully, see them emerge!

[frederiquelavoipierre]

Great idea! I once found these wonderful maggots in my garden in an old bucket. Thanks for a fun project.

[solariahuesmovies]

Great video. I'd suggest putting some rocks or something in if your pot has smooth sides - I had a dead frog in an old flower pot I did this in once :( and perhaps it would have helped the shrew too?

[raymondkilminster]

i built a few small open fronted wooden box's from scrap's and then put a half cut plastic container in side filled with leaves, twigs and rain water and put them up on a shady fence . they've all work really well with lots of larvae in all of them .

[bevelylawrence]

I will definitely be giving this a go....Thanks Dave x

[acma]

I now have rat-tailed maggots on my balcony🥳 I didn’t think it would work since there are so few hoverflies in my area, but it did! Thank you.

[thedude]

Excellent video Dave - will give it a go in 2021

[martynlegg]

Brilliant! I'll make one tomorrow.

[philoktoday]

Found you through researching what was swimming around in our upturned dustbin lid(bird bath) - thanks - fascinating - sort of ugly ducklings. We had ponds in our back garden growing up but never saw these as I suppose the many fish we had gobbled them up - so a fish free reciprocal is just the job.

[wildlifegardener-tracey]

Just checked my two, one with leaf matter one with grass. The leaf one far more popular 25 in there and 8 in the grass one.

[D-H-D]

Hi Dave, love your work. I made a black bins worth of aerated compost tea with an amendement of machine dehydrated kitchen scraps from clients restaurant and the bin was very quickly swarming with rat tailed maggots. Literally thousands! I followed Jesse Frosts - No Till Growers tutorial if you want to do the same. I didn't have molasses or fish fertiliser to feed the microbes though. Maybe the maggots fed of off the bacteria produced? And although initially aerated it was then left and so the microbes reduced the oxygen content making it go stagnant very quickly I présumé.

[antoinetrigaux]

Great idea, I will export this in Belgium! Would you need to refill with leaves or fresh water from time to time, to make it last all summer?

[shirleycirio]

If you could teach them to eat mosquito larva, I would have lagoons hovering in every corner of my yard!

[ncooper]

I’m going to try this. What is the best time of year to set this up?

[anondeilvers]

Where I currently live, we have a trough that carries our greywater into a ditch. I noticed that is teaming with the little guys so much that we periodically have to rake out their waste, which looks like some of the blackest, richest, soil I've ever seen. We now have a burm of said soil on each side of the trough and I reckon vegetables are herbs would grow from it readily. And the earthworms seem to take a strong liking to it as well.

[deniseinthegarden]

Just found you by chance as I was looking for info on these little maggots. I found some today in a plastic tub that had some rainwater in it. I was about to tip it away and clean the tub, when I spotted the maggots. Long story short I popped indoors to do some research and found you via Google and then here on YouTube. Would it be ok if I shared your video on the rat tailed lagoon on one of my videos 🤔 thank you

[the_green_anna]

Lovely! Thanks!
Is there a special time they lay their eggs or does it work all summer?

[sarahlo]

Brilliant video, I hope the survey runs next year so I can get involved. We actually get a lot of long-tailed larvae in the bottom, sump-section of our wormeries. I'm not quite sure how they get there since the wormery layers create a tight seal when put together. Unfortunately, I imagine the larvae must die in there since is no way out so I should probably extract them whenever found?