- Mon Aug 13, 2012 5:23 pm
#151175
Hi everyone, so first of all i am new to flytraps. I bought the three of them from a local garden store a little over a week ago, i get a lot of box elder bugs in and around the house during the warmer months so i figured they could start chowing down on them. I live in Salt Lake City Utah. I am using a paralite and peat moss mix for the media, i think i used about 40 para/60 peat and its about 4 inches deep. Watering and Spraying with distilled water. I try to keep the humidity between 60 and 80, and the media moister and about 5 or 6 at root level and 7 or 8 at the base. Now this is where i think my problem is at, the light i'm using is a 120volt 27 watt 5000k daylight fluorescent bulb. I don't know the fixtures specs because i got it along time ago and it doesn't say on it. I know i got it from a pet store for a heating lamp originally. The light hangs about 18 inches over the terrarium, and the plants are about 4 or 5 inches from the top of the terrarium, so 22 or 23 inches total. i started off giving them 12 hours of light a day. They each ate a bug the first day or so but none of the traps have really open up since. And i started to notice a few of the traps started dying (even a couple of the new little green ones) and the teeth were turning black. So i trimmed the dead stuff and did some research and read a report that i might be burning them with too much light. So i lowered it to 8 hours for one day and noticed it didn't help at all and maybe just got a little worse, so i did some more research and have been reading that they really cant get too much light and i'm thinking maybe mine is too high above the plants. When i bought them they came in some plastic tubes so all the traps were up and reaching for the sky lol, since i transplanted them they have spread out a bit and don't seem to be reaching out for light. I am going to be attaching some pictures of my setup, plants, and what they came in. The pictures were taken about 10 or 15 mins after a spraying and i used my phone so they aren't the best quality. Any advise or information will be much appreciated, thank you.
http://s587.photobucket.com/albums/ss31 ... 0Flytraps/
http://s587.photobucket.com/albums/ss31 ... 0Flytraps/