Mealworm farming

[ladyearth]

I keep them at room temperture no far from furnace vent. have newpaper layers and empty cut in half rolls in there too....
the drawers in the Sterlite file drawer sized. total of 5 drawers 10 inch wide by 13 long by 7 deep.....
I lay the carrot etc on quart sized yogurt lids in each drawer or milk jug lids too
had a shoebox size plastic container in one with a screen glued on but the screen nded up with holes in it,
thanks yall

 

[Kusanar]

Well, i just found my first pupae today. About 8 of them. Its taken forever because they have been really cold for the last few months. They were at the barn in the tack room until it started getting close to freezing at night, then i put them in the fridge for another month until stuff in the fridge started freezing, then i snuck them home, but the house is only heated to 70, so they have been pretty sluggish, but they survived and are now pupating. This entire colony started with 5 wild beetles i caught, so pretty impressive so far.

 

[azygous]

I'm curious about your "wild" beetles. Do you have a photo of them you can post? Where did you find them? I know there are untold varieties of darkling beetle in the wild, but I would like to see which one you are attempting to domesticate. Are the larvae the same size as meal worm larvae?

 

[Arielle]

The thing is, I am obsessed with egg flavor. I love nothing more than having eggs to eat and give away that are the absolute best quality. It's hobby, almost like a fetish. That means feeding mealworms, at least in winter. Hence, in the house.

In addition to the meal worms have you considered adding greens to their diet?? The chickens I mean. Lately I have been adding bags of rabbit chow as it is mostly alfalfa. Though this week I just remembered that Trotter is a product made by Purina for horses that is about half alfalfa too. Has made me wonder though if it is safe for chickens and human consumption though........as horses are not for human consumption in the US.

 

[Kusanar]

I'm curious about your "wild" beetles. Do you have a photo of them you can post? Where did you find them? I know there are untold varieties of darkling beetle in the wild, but I would like to see which one you are attempting to domesticate. Are the larvae the same size as meal worm larvae?

I didn't take any photos of the original ones. They look just like the ones posted on here though. I have a few horses that drop feed when they eat, in the summer months you can flip their buckets over and find darkling beetles hiding under the bucket. They jump to the ground and burrow into the sawdust and hay as soon as they are exposed to the light so they are pretty hard to catch, that's why I started with 5, that's all I could catch. The big meal worms are around an inch long, they do seem darker than the ones posted here, so they may be a little different, but they seem pretty similar. Since I now have pupae, I will try getting pictures of the new beetles whenever they "hatch" and stop being little white aliens

 

[azygous]

I didn't take any photos of the original ones. They look just like the ones posted on here though. I have a few horses that drop feed when they eat, in the summer months you can flip their buckets over and find darkling beetles hiding under the bucket. They jump to the ground and burrow into the sawdust and hay as soon as they are exposed to the light so they are pretty hard to catch, that's why I started with 5, that's all I could catch. The big meal worms are around an inch long, they do seem darker than the ones posted here, so they may be a little different, but they seem pretty similar. Since I now have pupae, I will try getting pictures of the new beetles whenever they "hatch" and stop being little white aliens

It almost sounds as if you found some darkling beetles that had experienced a life cycle in some livestock feed, emerging from eggs in that feed, and now are living "at large" as wild beetles. You may have simply re-domesticated them. Can't really know for sure without being a biologist with some dissecting tools.

 

[Kusanar]

I didn't take any photos of the original ones. They look just like the ones posted on here though. I have a few horses that drop feed when they eat, in the summer months you can flip their buckets over and find darkling beetles hiding under the bucket. They jump to the ground and burrow into the sawdust and hay as soon as they are exposed to the light so they are pretty hard to catch, that's why I started with 5, that's all I could catch. The big meal worms are around an inch long, they do seem darker than the ones posted here, so they may be a little different, but they seem pretty similar. Since I now have pupae, I will try getting pictures of the new beetles whenever they "hatch" and stop being little white aliens

It almost sounds as if you found some darkling beetles that had experienced a life cycle in some livestock feed, emerging from eggs in that feed, and now are living "at large" as wild beetles. You may have simply re-domesticated them. Can't really know for sure without being a biologist with some dissecting tools.

Yeah, I know, I originally gave them a few inches of corn meal (I know they won't eat it much, more as something they could dig in) and a hand full of horse feed, now they are in oatmeal and horse feed.

 

[Jkaczanowski]

I'm hoping someone could help me. We just purchased our 8 baby chicks about 2 weeks ago and after reading the forums, and this thread in particular, I decided to start raising mealworms as a treat for them. I ordered 2000 mixed size from Amazon and received them today. I dumped the burlap bag into my substrate and 2 different size beetles came out with the larvae. I believe the single, larger beetle is the mealworm beetle but I'm not sure what the smaller beetles are (there are lots of them). I suspect it is a foreign grain beetle but I want to make sure before I start killing them off. Here is a picture of the smaller beetle (bottom middle against the side of the bin) next to a mealworm.

My current plan is to leave the single mealworm beetle in with the larvae, pick out and kill all other "grain" beetles, and move pupae and beetles out to other drawers as I get them. It seems like too much work to create a whole additional drawer for a single good beetle. Any other suggestions?

Thank you for any advice!

Jenn

 

[Jensownzoo]

Yeah, that's not a mealworm beetle. You can go ahead and throw it to your chicks live if you like.

 

[Jkaczanowski]

Thank-you very much! I picked out the little bugs using tweezers. The chicks seemed much more interested in the mealworms than in them, though.