1. You do not have to have a separate bin for the different stages, it mostly depends on how big of a farm you want to have. If you just want a small farm then a single bin would be enough, you just have to make sure you always have potatoes, carrots, or something of the sort for the beetles and adult worms to eat/drink otherwise they will eat the eggs that have been laid in the bedding.
2. Again this all depends on how many worms you hope to get out of your farm. The bigger the space, the more room you will have to grow mealworms. Make sure you don't fill the container with to much bedding though. you only need about 3-5 inches of it.
3. As long as it is dry in the barn this would be fine. If there is any chance of the bedding getting wet, or even slightly moist I would say no. Moist bedding produces mold which in turn can kill off your mealworms.
4. This step, for me personally, is unnecessary. There is really no need to clean the cages you keep them in. Every few days if you just take your hand, or anything really, and mix the bedding up, this puts the shedded skins down into the bedding which the worms will just consume.
As for collecting the frass, this is somewhat simple, but depends on what stage your farm is in. All you have to do is take a strainer with small holes (large enough for the frass to fall through, but not large enough for small mealworms to fall through), put a little in there at a time and shake it so that the smaller particles fall through into another container, and the worms and uneaten bedding can be dumped back into the original container, or a third, temporary container until finished. (I find it easier with a third container).
However, if you have reached the point of having beetles in your farm, which means eggs, then there is another step you have to complete. Once you have strained everything as mentioned above, you need to put a few carrots in with the strained material because there will undoubtedly be eggs and newly hatched mealworms in there because they are small enough to go through the strainer. Simply keep a few carrots in there and wait about a week or two until they get a little bigger and re-strain it so that all the mealworms can be saved and dumped into the container with all the others.
Hope this helps,
Justin
very helpful
