FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

I recently bought a Venus Fly trap about a month ago and I've been taking wonderful care of it. It is Growing many new healthy leaves and just in general has been great. Recently since I've been keeping the plant outside I've noticed that the traps have been triggered without bugs inside... They reopen but then are triggered a couple of days later. I noticed that it was big flies bothering the plant and I feel like this may harm the plant after wasting energy so constantly. Any advice? Thanks.

What I would do in that situation would be to provide some kind of shelter like a greenhouse. If not available, then try hand feeding the traps so they close with a bug inside them. The digestion takes a few days, so that trap would be safe for a while.

Thank you. However, I feel like the greenhouse may overheat the plant, and in the long run don't you think it might harm to have all the traps in digestion process... overfeeding etc.? My question is more of should I be concerned that bugs are constantly triggering the traps without plant being successful at eating them since this may happen in nature.?

Hmm... Is it because your traps are too slow or are the flies too fast? If the traps don't close fast enough, I would keep a close eye on it and make sure the care is precise.

My fly trap closes at a normal rate, I feel it is because the flies are too big for the traps being triggered and yeah i noticed they were fast just randomly landing on it and flying away as I noticed this morning when they triggered them. Yeah the care has been precise following all my research and guidelines on this site. It's just frustrating to not know how to help it out without harming it yourself. :/

Sorry. I can't help a lot because I only have a year or two of experience.

I would build a cage out of hardware cloth/ wire mesh which has a small enough mesh size to allow smaller insects through but will keep the larger flies off the traps. I had to build some cages a week or so ago to keep out birds and squirrels.
I basically made a tube of mesh and used zip-ties to hold the edges together then zip-tied a piece of mesh on the top and trimmed it to size with a pair of strong scissors.
The mesh allows full sun light to get to the plants while effectively keeping larger bugs and critters away.


**My mesh size was chosen to keep out critters, not large bugs. Adjust size accordingly.**

Paulos

Bought a $2 dollar pasta drainer and tweaked it