Area Dried Mealworms Safe

[Chooky1]

Is it safe to give chickens dried Mealworms? If so how much do I give them?

 

[Alagirl]

do you mean the bugs you get at the store?
Yes, those are safe.
And they are like chicken crack!
Don't give too many of them. You do need them to eat a balanced diet.
I give my 5 hens a large handful at bedtime. It's a treat, so they like me, and consider evening time the time to be near the coop.

If you look through the articles her eon BYC, you should find something on how to raise your own mealworms.
Those are (assuming you feed them good stuff) also safe for the chickens.

 

[gtaus]

Mealworms are safe for your chickens. They are considered treats and you would not want to toss too many in at one time. Where I live, dried mealworms at the store are very expensive. There are a number of YouTube videos on growing your own mealworms at home if you really want to get into it and save lots of money.

I use cracked corn instead as a treat. It's much cheaper and the chickens love it. But it has very little nutritional value, so only a small amount is given at a time.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

In moderation, they are fine. Dried mealworms are a concentrated nutritional source - nutrient dense - meaning its easy to throw a diet out of whack with them. Unfortunately, one of the things they are dense in is fat, and excess fat is VERY bad for chickens. Dried mealworms are often identified as being 25-30% fat. A chicken's diet should be about 3.5% fat +/- daily. Functionally, that means that 0.4 ounces (about 11.5g) of dried mealworms represents a chickens entire recommended fat intake for the day. No, your chickens won't die if you accidentally feed them 4% fat for a day - in fact, fat recommends for waterfowl like ducks are around 4.5%, and Cx (Cornish X, raised for quick table, not longevity) are often fed 6 or 7% fat levels) - but fat can build with time, and its far moredetrimental than a slight increase in protein is beneficial.

So use it only as a treat. Similar to a vitamin at home - one a day , not a plate full. (its actually a couple of dried mealworms a day, but you get the idea)

 

[Al Gerhart]

The vast majority of dried meal worms I found were from China, fed on some pretty horrible stuff including human waste, even decaying chickens dug up out of poultry barn litter.

In commercial flocks meal worms are a disaster to the flock as they devour the dead chicks/poults that the care takers missed on their daily rounds picking up dead birds, those birds died usually of a result of their fragile immune systems being overwhelmed so the meal worms pass along the pathogens to the rest of the flock. The dead birds quickly get trampled into the litter and the meal worm beetles are ever present in the litter.

If I was going to feed meal worms, I would for sure raise them myself so I could control what they were raised on.