Meal worms

[thepetpaw]

How old should the chciks be before you give them a meal worm............

Are they worth the price -

Where do you buy them - anyone know of a good place to buy in bulk?

 

[Royal Blue]

I've given my birds meal worms as early as 2 weeks. The birds love them. They think the worms are candy. I get freeze dried worms at a local feed store. The cost is about 1 tenth the cost of live worms and they keep longer. Are they worth the cost? Well, that depends on how many you go through. They are a great source of protein.

 

[kmom246]

So if I have 27 peeps that are 8 weeks old and I want to give them a meal worm treat once a week, what might that total out to be in either number of worms or cost to purchase? Might it be worth it to raise my own? (I have a tarantula, too, and she might like the beetles for a snack, but by herself, she is not worth raising anything - I just have my son go hunt something down for her).

 

[MissPrissy]

I am growing my own meal worms. Very easy to do.

 

[PAChickenChick]

MissPrissy...you are amazing! Is there anything you don't or can't do?

Raising your own mealworms appears to be an easy thing to do and a super money saver. Anyone interested in this can do a YouTube search and come up with a gazillion examples....or maybe our resident guru will open a thread....

(did ya catch that hint MissPrissy??? lol )

 

[therealsilkiechick]

i use them for treats for the chookies and food for our lepard geckos. we started buy getting a 1,000 live off of ebay for about $18.50 shipped from ohio. it is cheaper to buy them that way than our petstore for 500 live for about $17.

i hope they multiply,lol but we haven't had them to long. we only lost mabe about 5 during ship and all r nice and healthy. the other reason we went with ebay is the geckos need small ones and our petstore only carries the supersized ones and no freeze dried either, they can't get any smaller in also. they said jump on it cuz they can't promise when they will be in again any smaller and our pair of geckos need to eat so we did. we also got to pick the size we needed, they had several sizes to choose from.
silkie

 

[MissPrissy]

There is already a couple threads on meal worms -

https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=74575

 

[Richard E. Nixon]

Pet store here sells mealworms. Four bucks for 35 large, same price for 50 small. Yowsa.

Raising mealworms yourself is very inexpensive, BUT it takes a LONG time. Full life cycle is six months or so. Once you have an established colony (at least 10 thousand live things in various life stages, double that amount if you aren't squeamish), you'll have a good supply of the 'worms' (they're actually larvae BTW) for the birds to snack on. I say 'snack', because I'm guessing it would take 25 chickens less than five minutes to plow thru and devour a thousand mealworms ... then look at you, disappointed in that you 'only' gave them 1000.

Someday, I would like to have enough mealworms onhand to provide 25-50% of the chickens' daily food intake. I cannot imagine at this time how many I would need to have on hand each day, let alone how large my mealworm farm would be.

Jay

 

[thepetpaw]

I gound a place in china that sells them freeze dried. Maybe I will buy them in bulk and sell a few then keep a few for myself. I have my own business and deal with China on a regular basis but never thought of doing this. It will be so much cheaper than the feed stores....

Is there a big difference between the freeze dried ones and the wiggly ones....?

I am getting peig ears, bully sticks and so forth for my business so I might as well add some freeze dried meal worms - what is the difference (for the chickens) when it comes to the wiggly ones and the dried ones - i am sure they will enjoy the live ones more but I cannot afford to buy them all the time and I dont think I want to open a big box with bettles (bugs) running all over the placce...I hate bugs and that is one reason i am buying (on their way) 30 keets!

 

[kmom246]

Ok, it looks like perhaps the meal worm farm thing might be something to actually consider in the future for my 27 girls. And the tarantula might be a lucky bystander. I used to raise a limited amount of crickets for the spider, but they smelled. It sounds like meal worms don't smell too much. Also, I have an extra fridge in the metal building where we keep beer, bottled water and "non-people food like stuff". I suppose we could hibernate some in there, too, when needed. Who knew I would be considering purposely raising bugs! Ewww!