Mealworm farming

[WestKnollAmy]

I have been seeing alot of my pupae are dried up & brown , some have holes in them.... I have them in oats & give them banana peels & whole bananas also? The room is about 75-80 & I have a cup of water in there also ????? Any suggestions?

I would provide a variety of fruits and veggies. Carrots, tomatoes, bananas, potatoes etc. as that seems to help mine when they are in a full colony. I have not found holes in my pupae when I separated them out but I used to in the full cycle colony and tried to vary the foods. Also maybe a bit of wheat bread since they are on oats. Just a thought but I try all sorts of things when I notice something "off" in my bins. I won;t be able to do as much once summer is here so I am trying a lot more now.

And yes, mine love bananas. Any fruit or veggie we have here they get to try. After all, it will be good for the chickens.....eventually.

 

[WestKnollAmy]

Wow...Amy I looked at your website and I think we are going to try and raise some. You made it look so easy!!!

Wonderful!
It IS easy! You all will enjoy it so much!
Granted I think I enjoyed it more when I didn't have 14 bins (and growing) but no one else needs to have so many. Just one colony can do so much to help someone's backyard flock and they produce so well that it is just as much a treat for the family as for the chickens. Well, not an edible treat for the family but an entertaining one.
So get your container, substrate and mealies and get started!

 

[Smiles-N-Sunshine]

Last night I took a large segment of banana peel (about 1/3 of the entire peel), and soaked it in water. The beetles swarmed it! Then, a few minutes later, I added a bottlecap full of water to the banana peel "canoe", and beetles stood at the edge of the water and drank like African critters by a water hole.

So now I think things are running on the dry side in my colonies, given our desert climate. I'm going to keep doing this, to see if I get better production. (Not that I keep any records, or anything.)

I wonder if giving the beetles vitamins in the water would do anything? I was eyeballing a partially-used package of chick vitamins.

 

[Smiles-N-Sunshine]

Well, not an edible treat for the family but an entertaining one.

Sure, they're edible! http://edibug.wordpress.com/list-of-edible-insects/ Many, if not most, of the world's cultures have insects in their diet. In America, we've pretty much settled on just the occasional tequila worm.

I sometimes munch on a big mealworm larva at the snowy white, just molted stage - like soft-shell crab - and I ate crickets in Iraq, probably because weeks of MREs were getting to me. What do they taste like? Not much, actually!

 

[andrea98]

I gave them some dry flake fish food also ... They do eat it!! I'm just wondering if the just want a better variety of foods that's why they are possibly eating the pupae ???

 

[WestKnollAmy]

Wow! They actually lined up and drank from the water pool? That is most interesting.
It is dry in my house but not too bad as we get rain every few days and we go in and out so much that my skin hasn't had the usual dry feel it gets in the winter with the heat running so much. This winter has been mild for us so far, which in a way is very good for the meal worm bins. Mine have been enjoying the carrots, cukes, tomatoes, bananas, apples and what ever we eat so I do not think they are wanting more but with your climate I can see them enjoying extra water. Maybe you need to build them a sauna? (Okay, I'm not cultured enough to know if saunas are wet or dry or both, so bear with me.)

DH had wanted to spritz the food with vitamins but I haven't done it since I wasn't sure what ratio to help instead of hurt the mealies. But I would think it could really help the chickens, too. I suppose just a regular mix like for chickens and possibly soak some fruits or veggies in it? Or slightly spray some paper. With yours drinking from a trough though you have it a bit better!

Well, yeah, I knew some people ate them but I am not so sure any of us would. Did you see where on Dirty Jobs that guy ate one and then had a spitting attack? LOL If I were to eat them (and only under extreme duress) I would dry them first, not plop a meaty live one in my mouth. Duh! Although maybe people eat them live like that but .....er....no thanks.

I have read where some people add fish food to the substrate. I did put a few old containers in my freezer when I cleaned out the cabinet. I have no idea if they ate it or not as I sprinkled it on top and later never saw it. I wasn't sure if they just ground it in or actually munched on it but I didn't want it to go to waste.
I suppose my next deformed beetle experiment will have some fish food added in the jar with it.

 

[wolftracks]

Well we were going to start this way back when this thread started, but never did. Finally this weekend we were buying a container at Walmart and just bought 2 containers of 25 each in the sporting goods section. Got a bug up my.......when the container was twice what it cost on the shelf and I get too antsy when I'm out. I have panic attacks, and no way was I gonna have one over worms, so had them put the container back, Got home and oops! Still had the worms!

May only be 50 of them, but my grand daughter was so excited about raising worms for the birds, we put oats into a Folgers container and since I had cut apples up for the rabbits, we saved the core area. Still lots of fruit on them and we put on in with the worms. And since they were so few we added a few skins from potatoes that night. I read on here about carrots and put on of those in last night, but haven't seen them near it.

These things are getting huge! It's only been 3-4 days, so I have no idea how they got that big that fast, but not complaining. They seem to be doing fine in there.

I have a question though. My heater isn't working, so we bundle. I live in a tiny house and don't have room for one more thing, which is why it's taken so long to get started in the first place. How warm do the worms need to be to start going through the stages? I'm going to have to figure out a way to warm the container and not sure how I'm going to do that, but I know I need too. My brother used to raise these things for all of his beasts he had in high school, but I never really checked them out when I was there, so I know it can be done even in a cooler room. He always had his room cooler than the rest of my mom's house back then, but that's because he had snakes and an alligator and the lights warmed it so much, he slept with the windows open. Just wish now I had seen what he was doing.

I tried to keep up with this thread in the begining and read last night till I was falling asleep and nothing was making sense anymore. LOL So whats a good cheap way of adding heat, to get these guys moving? At 50 worms it's gonna take a decade to even get this started. LOL

 

[Kassaundra]

Well we were going to start this way back when this thread started, but never did. Finally this weekend we were buying a container at Walmart and just bought 2 containers of 25 each in the sporting goods section. Got a bug up my.......when the container was twice what it cost on the shelf and I get too antsy when I'm out. I have panic attacks, and no way was I gonna have one over worms, so had them put the container back, Got home and oops! Still had the worms!

May only be 50 of them, but my grand daughter was so excited about raising worms for the birds, we put oats into a Folgers container and since I had cut apples up for the rabbits, we saved the core area. Still lots of fruit on them and we put on in with the worms. And since they were so few we added a few skins from potatoes that night. I read on here about carrots and put on of those in last night, but haven't seen them near it.

These things are getting huge! It's only been 3-4 days, so I have no idea how they got that big that fast, but not complaining. They seem to be doing fine in there.

I have a question though. My heater isn't working, so we bundle. I live in a tiny house and don't have room for one more thing, which is why it's taken so long to get started in the first place. How warm do the worms need to be to start going through the stages? I'm going to have to figure out a way to warm the container and not sure how I'm going to do that, but I know I need too. My brother used to raise these things for all of his beasts he had in high school, but I never really checked them out when I was there, so I know it can be done even in a cooler room. He always had his room cooler than the rest of my mom's house back then, but that's because he had snakes and an alligator and the lights warmed it so much, he slept with the windows open. Just wish now I had seen what he was doing.

I tried to keep up with this thread in the begining and read last night till I was falling asleep and nothing was making sense anymore. LOL So whats a good cheap way of adding heat, to get these guys moving? At 50 worms it's gonna take a decade to even get this started. LOL

Put the container on top of your refrigerator, they will stay warmer there. The warmer the more active and the quicker they grow and develop, but I think they still grow some as low as 60 degrees. The temps in the refrigerator put them in dormancy like condition.

 

[WestKnollAmy]

Oh yeah, that is another observation. As they are warmer, they tend to want more fruits and veggies and with the intake of more moisture they seem to ....."inflate".

Bigger, fatter and very shiny meal worms.

 

[wolftracks]

OK they'll go on top of the fridge today. Some were pretty long, but now it looks like most at at least 2 inches long and they are getting shinier. I just took dead skin out of there, but think I'll just let that go and see how they turn out when it happens again.

My grand daughter was looking at them and said "wow, those are getting to be fat worms alright!" LOL Now she wants to feed them to the birds, so I have to keep explaining that we need these to get more.

I typed this out and thought I had posted. Came home and here it sat.