Oh, you poor man! Meal worm farming is supposed to be fun! It's not supposed to entail so much agonizing effort! Your farm shouldn't require much more effort and thought than keeping your water heater supplying hot water!
A system of stacked covered shallow trays should keep your farm producing larvae to feed out on a regular basis with no more effort than tossing a few baby carrots to the tiny beasts every few days, much as you'd toss a bone to a mangy yard dog.
By cutting a hole in the bottom of the beetle container and gluing screening over it, then cutting a matching hole in the lid of a second tray, you can stack them and your beetles can be happily ignored in their luxurious bed of rolled oats while they have mad sex with one another with complete and utter abandon, while their oodles of tiny eggs filter down through the screened bottom into the tray beneath filled with wheat bran to cushion and nourish the baby larvae. Kept between 75F and 85F, you will see some real action.
At warm temps, the larvae grow like mad, shedding their exoskeltons as they grow larger and larger. In about three months they go from miniscule to feeding size of an inch.
The only time you will need to sift frass is when you see the larvae have about eaten themselves out of house and home. I did this just last night with a tray. It took me all of fifteen minutes to get them safely tucked into their fresh new bedding and popped back on the shelf to ignore for another month. Except for tossing the little beasts a couple carrot stubs.
The only sorting I ever do is when the pupae in the larvae trays present me with some bouncing baby beetles. They're easy to round up, which I try to do every few days or so during the pupae stage. I leave scraps of newspaper in the trays and the beetles cling to the undersides. I just pick them up and shake the paper into the beetle tray. Takes all of two minutes.
Once in a great while, I'll clean house in the beetle tray, picking out the dead ones. They're the only source of odor to the entire colony, and being fond of my beetles, I like to keep them clean and happy.
I examine the tray of bran under the beetle tray for movement after about a month after putting a fresh one under there. When I see the substrate move when I drag a finger through it, I replace that tray with a fresh tray of bran, pop a carrot into the tray with the newly hatched larvae, and pop a lid on it and put it in the stack to ignore for the next three months while the larvae grow.
Really. A worm farm shouldn't be a grueling effort of back breaking labor.
