Mealworm farming

[onafixedincome]

Oooh, I LOVE it when that happens!!

All of a sudden you have this...flaky brown stuff just everywhere, and you know that they leaped another notch ahead! Way to goooooo, mealies!

Hannakat--sorry I missed your comment on the pupae size..

Some of these are REALLY little, and others are REALLY BIG.

I am finding that laying a piece of bell pepper over the resting pre-pupal monsters seems to be making it easier for them to completely shed that last skin....the pupae have thus far all appeared directly UNDER the pepper piece and all have emerged 'clean'. The one or two who have not pupated there have had some difficulty, it seems.

This last batch of mealies came with a bonus beetle--but it's tiny! My single newly emerged one is about five times the size--perhaps that one is from a large pupa versus the teensy little ones, which make for the teensy little beetles??

I LOVE this...I get to learn so much just by watching, although I probably drive everyone nuts with my posts...

 

[Gallo del Cielo]

onafixedincome, I'm very curious about the different sized pupae/beetles that you have. Could you post a pic of them?

 

[bloom_ss]

Quote:
Me too! Most of mine are about 3/4" long and just under 1/4" wide and some are about half that size and I have sizes in between those also. I've never had one that was so much smaller than all of the rest though. I'd love to see a picture of the large and small beetle with something like a quarter for size comparison.

 

[HenCrazyMom]

Gave the mealies some celery today! Holy fast consumption. Not a shred of it left when I got home from work. The girls and boys are getting a bunch of mealies tomorrow morning for breakfast with their oatmeal!!!! I really love to spoil them all!!!

 

[Emily1220]

This whole mealworm farming thread has me very curious and wanting to try it. But since they seems to reproduce soooo much are you all using the mealworms as a "treat" or as the "feed" for chickens. I just cant quite get a grip on having thousands of worms on staggered starting ages. How many does a chicken eat or need a day??? I'm just now learning but am getting excited about this.

 

[hannakat]

Quote:
Hi and welcome to the farm!!!

We all do it a little different and for different reasons. I have 4 chickadees and am giving them a little less than 1/4 cup of worms daily. (1/4 cup is egual to approximately 250 worms....divided 4 ways although there's one hen who believes all of them are for her!!!) I froze a bunch when the worms were 'coming of age' and let some develop into beetles to start the next generation, which are now almost the right size to start feeding. I will feed them off to the chickadees saving some to continue to develop for the next generation.

I am not keeping multiple bins for different generations but do keep the beetles separate just for ease of collecting worms...meets the needs as I have established them!

I'm sure others will come along and share....

 

[onafixedincome]

Okay...I have managed to convince mealies, camera, and me to all get together and party, so if you want to see alllll the pics I took in one place, here's where they're hiding:

http://community.webshots.com/album/582011698dZcvgC?vhost=community

Here's (I hope, if this works!) a teaser:
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[Gallo del Cielo]

Quote:

Wow! I've never seen anything like that kind of intra-colony variation in size. The size variation is most easily seen in the pupae pics with the battery as scale. A very conservative estimate would suggest the biggest ones are three to four times the weight of the smallest. I don't think the variation in sizes of pupae in my colonies has ever exceeded 25%. Are these the first generation of pupae since you've gotten mealworms? Have you seen large and small beetles yet? Is the variation in size continuous, or does it seem to have two distinct groups, one large and one small? It's difficult to tell from the picture--because you may have collected the largest and smallest to highlight the differences between them (which we wanted to see). The largest ones look a bit reminiscent of superworms (Zophobas morio), although a little bit on the small size. Anklebiter is raising them right now, I'd like to know what he or someone currently raising them has to say. It's possible that you have two different species, but it's hard to determine that from the pics. Thank you so much for posting them. I'm even more curious now about this variation. Perhaps different strains have different variability characteristics?

Anybody else have sizable variation in pupae or beetles and want to share pics?

 

[onafixedincome]

Ha! I KNEW I wasn't totally crazy on this! **

The sizes are really very distinct, as are the color variations--but the color variants are all the same size. No cherrypicking was done to emphasize the difference, in other words.

The batch which is producing the large pupae is the first I bought, at one petstore. They were 'Mediums'--about the size of the largest others I have right now when purchased to avoid possibly hormonally-treated stock. (The 'large' ones were about the size these are at pupation.) I'll call this batch Supplier C for clarity

.

I thought that Superworms could not survive in temps less than 70....and my house runs 58-62 with very few exceptions.

The other batches (all from the same supplier, NOT from the same one as the first batch) are the ones which had the color variants and the single tiny beetle. (Supplier T)

As noted in the captions of the pics (I admit they can be hard to find on Webshots), there was one tiny beetle in a Supplier T batch. (If you didn't go look at the whole album, I highly recommend it.) The large beetle pictured is from one of the large pupae (Supplier C), I am fairly certain.

You can see now why I have been so persistently puzzled, I hope!

**This statement makes absolutely no guarantee or warranty as to the state of my alleged mind at any other time or on any other subject.

 

[BeccaSmith]

Well I have at least 2 dozen of pupa and I have been spooning them out into a seperate container as I find them. I've been reading on raising meal worms but it is still not super clear to me on what the next step is for when the pupa hatch into beetles such as what I should have set up for them in a container. I read to use wheat bran about an inch or so deep for them and to provide a carrot of something for them to feed on when they hatch. Do I need to provide anything special for them for egg laying? Any other special conditions they like?