Are your VFT's grow inside or outside? Did they have a dormancy period? I would cut off the flower scapes, as they put a lot of stress on the plants if they haven't been grown outside in direct sunlight and / or had a proper dormnacy for the winter.

"By the time I saw the stalk forming it was way too high to cut. It would have been pointless at that point in the growth to chop it. "

thats not true..
there is no such as thing as "too high to cut" or "pointless to cut"..IMO, you should *always* cut the flower stalk off, no matter how high it is..
even if flowers have opened! its still not "too late to cut"..because producing seeds takes a lot of energy..
so cutting off a flower stalk, even if flowers have already opened and the stalk is very tall, is still beneficial to the plant..there is no such thing as "too high to cut"

Scot

it died because it might have been to small the flytrap and the flower sucked all of the enerygy from it.

I grow orchids and carnivorous plants and the part of reproduction that sucks most energy from any plant is that spike initiation. I have read that the spike takes tremendous energy to form and take less and less momentum or energy to finish. I have read in many sources the most draining part of any plant is spike formation. The best way to equate this is to a car stopped at a stop sign or light which is totally stationary unless you take your foot off the brake. When you need to go forward after the sing or light has changed, you need to step on the gas which sends fuel and oxygen barreling into the engine for combustion. The first 5 seconds from dead stop to starting back up to speed is what uses the most fuel and then after that, the car gains momentum very rapidly and can stay in motion for longer with less energy used to maintain speed. The same can be said about a flower spike, using tremendous energy to start the flower spike but using less and less to keep it growing. So there is a point where even though the plant may not be using much energy to keep growing, and you can find this info on other forums, the damage has been done if the flower spike is more than 1-2" long/high. Next time you have a flytrap that tries to bloom before it is ready, you should cut the tip of the spike off if it is 1-2" long - anything higher than that and the plant has used so much energy to initiate the spike, that the damage has been dealt. I have also heard that cutting the spike at this time can actually yield new identical growths from the flower spike. I hope to try this when my plants come out of dormancy next year.