How much livefood to feed?

[finchbob]

My livefood arrived recently, frozen pinkies aka maggots. I have quite a few birds who need livefood, at least 46 finches, does anyone know how often the livefood should be fed, should it be daily, or only a few times a week, and in general how much livefood for each bird?

[lovemyfinch]

The only fids I have that "need" livefood are my shaftails. I usually give them about 30 a day, but I also only start when I know that babies are to hatch any day now. I must also say that there food is now no longer "live" when I give it to them. I put the mealies in the freezer for at least an hour before feeding, otherwise I find beatles crawling around the house a few weeks later. I just happen to have "flingers"

[cindy]

I have raised shaftails with and without live food. I prefer not to feed live if they take the dried egg food mix or boiled egg.

[L in Ontario]

My fosters raised Shaftails w/o any live food.

What kind of finches do you have finchbob?

[Sally]

As far as I know, we don't have frozen pinkies available in the U.S., probably someone from the U.K. will be able to help you more on that.

[diinin]

I was actually wondering about this too--how often to feed live food. Mine all seem to love mealworms. They'd love to have them every day, but is this too often? The blue girl gets the most, not because she's the early bird, but because she scarfs them down!

[Ursula]

I give mine mini mealworms daily. I don't see what should be wrong about that.... And it's almost exclusively the Cordon Bleus that eat them.

[diinin]

I was told that the blues love mealies, but my orange cheeks and goldbreasts do too. They are pretty slow about getting them down, though, and sometimes the blues come over and steal them right from their beaks!

I also don't plan to breed the birdies, and very much hope they cooperate with that, so I wasn't sure if they needed all those worms in that case. They so look forward to them in the morning. It would be nice if we could do them every day. I also feed an egg food bug mix (Quiko), but I'm not sure they're even eating that.

[B CAMP]

I give all my flights mealworms twice a day and I think all mine eat them. I use a product called miracle meal dry and mix mashed hard boiled eggs and sprouts every am thats where I put the mealworms seems to cause them to eat more of the egg food but some just eat the mealies

[diinin]

Okay, so maybe every day isn't so bad. They will be happy about that. I figure live feeders surely eat worms every day in the wild, but then they're also breeding, too.