Mealie math...hm. Insanity has struck again, and I'm going to try this. Let's see if I'm making any sense here or if I'm as far off as I think I am!
First, how many mealies are you going to feed every day? (I have almost 20 chickens, so we'll start there. Banties, although you wouldn't know by their appetites!)
As a supplement/good hunk of the diet, I would want to feed...oh, let's say 50 medium per day per chicken. That's a thousand mealies a DAY, or 356,000 a year, assuming chicken math doesn't intrude <har de har har>.
Okay. Starting point found, let's think about how the female beetles lay...they lay about 300 eggs in their lifespan, but with attrition and variation, I'm going to oh-so-conveniently round it down to 200.
That means that I'd need the full lifetime output of five female beetles each day to feed the monsters...and they take time to grow! So...in what, about a month, the 1000 from Day One are now 30 days and you have 29,000 more coming up for harvest...1,000 each day.
To keep the beetles producing, you're going to need to replace those females at the rate of five per day, call it 2,000 per year, so you will need to grow out 4,000 beetles each year over the course of the year--just to replace breeders. Sooo...
A running colony of 10,000 beetles should be giving me 2 million meealies each year total.
At a thousand mealies fed out each day, that's ...356*1000 = 356,000.
*Oy...my head hurts!* This is getting very confusing!
Soooo....check me here, but once a colony of 10,000 gets going, and if you don't mind freezing surplus mealies....it *should* be able to produce up to 2 million mealies a year...and if you assume a productive lifespan on the beetles of 3 months, 40-50,000 of those are going to be cycled back into the colony as replacements...
100 chickens, getting 50 mealies a day each, would be 5,000 mealies a day. 356 x 5000 = 1,780,000 mealies per year.
So yes, a 10,000 beetle colony could probably keep your 80 supplied nicely if conditions are excellent and barring disasters...
...I think!
