Mealworm farming

[CluckyJay]

Some of the 1,000 I ordered started to pupate last night. I am building that flow-through mealworm farm. I bought those 1.00 plastic containers at walmart because I didn't want to spend nearly 20.00 on that three drawer unit. Should work just as well as the fancy one! It is nearly the same size too.

I am planning to move them to much larger quarters so I can breed pounds and pounds of them for drying. Then mixed with my soldier worms and other stuff should be really nice for the cats, chickens and future ducks and quail.

 

[OhioPete]

I don't have a local source for wheat bran and was looking for suggestions on other media to use. I have lots of oats and cornmeal, will that work ok? I'm sure it's mentioned somewhere in the giant thread but I don't really want to search through 80+ pages.

Thanks

 

[LibertyChick]

Quote:
Thank you for posting that again. Yes, putting that on the 1st page would be great and easy to find again in the futrue.


I have another question...Is it ok to fee them the seeds and stuff that's on the inside of a cantelope and watermellon seeds?

 

[CluckyJay]

Cornmeal is used to raise them yes. So is whole wheat flour.

 

[hannakat]

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Oats are perfect, as is cornmeal. You can mix it also...just keep the cornmeal at a lower percentage. In my beetle drawer, I keep only rolled oats. In one of the other drawers I have a ground up mixture of oats, corn meal, chicken feed, wheat flour and dried milk. I ground it up in our coffee grinder. The worms really like it. You can add some fish food flakes too, from what I understand, amoung other things. Hopefully, others will come along and share their substrate 'recipe'!

LibertyChick ~ ??? You can try and let us know what happens! I now stay away from all things 'fruit' since it tends to go moldy too fast on me.

 

[LibertyChick]

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Is there a healthfood store around? You might want to check there. As far as the internet goes, you might want to search for bulk food distributors or organic bulk food distributors or bulk food wheat germ, the possibilities are endless.

 

[galanie]

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They can grab onto a raw potato slice or veggie bit too. I don't know if it kills them not to flip them back over or not, I always help them get upright when I do that just in case. You can also lay a piece of paper or paper toweling down for them to gather under, they seem to like that pretty well.

 

[galanie]

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Like hannacat said, shouldn't bother them at all. I mess around in mine like that sometimes and it doesn't seem to hurt anyone.


On the Great Moth Experiment, I still don't know if they eat the moth pupae or eggs or not. It's just weird to me that none showed up except where the wormies don't hang out in the second bin extreme front and back. I did see moths in the upper bin (using drawer system with screened top drawer) but never found any of those web cocoon things in that one, just the "unused" sections of drawer two.

I finally bit the bullet and sifted through drawer 2 and got all of the moth junk out I could. Here's hoping that they don't show back up. I think those moths came from some bird seed I got a few weeks ago that I didn't put in the freezer till after it sat in the kitchen a few days. I always freeze my bird seed for a day because I've gotten bugs in it so often. From now on I'm not going to wait to do it, either!

 

[galanie]

Quote:
Is there a healthfood store around? You might want to check there. As far as the internet goes, you might want to search for bulk food distributors or organic bulk food distributors or bulk food wheat germ, the possibilities are endless.

Also, you can get cheap store brand one minute type oats in the larger containers. I look for it on sale and buy a few cartons at a time since that is my main substrate for the worms plus the chickens MUST have their oatmeal treat every day.

 

[OhioPete]

Well I had a bunch of cans of oats at home and I was out shopping when I posted from my phone so I bought a few more cans of cornmeal while I was out...lol. I'm a bit impatient. I also got a three drawer setup from Walmart for about $10 too. I understand the first two drawers with the screen in the first drawer so the larvae fall to the second drawer but when do you put in the bottom drawer? Is that where you put the mealworms themselves to "finish" before you feed them to you birds or store them?


Quote:
Is there a healthfood store around? You might want to check there. As far as the internet goes, you might want to search for bulk food distributors or organic bulk food distributors or bulk food wheat germ, the possibilities are endless.