Mealworms and chickens

[twendt]

I've fed dried mealworms as a daily treat with NO" ILL" effects. My spoiled hens would revolt if I nevered offered them again. I buy them by the 5lb bag. My oldest hens are 3yrs old and lay daily!! I spread a couple of hand fulls on the ground in the morning.

 

[ChickenChick135]

Since we have started building up a small hobby farm, just rabbits and chickens so far. Our place was all timber so we don't even have garden beds yet. Starting it all with compost, worms, rabbits and chickens. As we started to build a "farm plan" so to speak we wanted to be as self sufficient as possible. I thought hey we could raise mealworms. The mealworms could eat the dehydrated rabbit poop, which they absolutely love, the mealworms get fed to the chickens all for the price of rabbit feed which we will continue to buy until we can grow it. So me being me, and having the mind of a military retiree, I wanted to know as much as I could about mealworms and chickens. What I found was enough for me to completely scrap my idea. The mealworms were all sold off as reptile food and will never be feed to my chickens ever again. There was a study publish by Stellenbosch University. The study was conducted to see if there was any possibility of the backyard farmer to feed their chickens off of insects they could raise on there own. Conclusion was that mealworms caused erosion of the gizzard lining over extended periods of use. The study did prove that Black Soldier Fly Larvae is safe.

Here is the link:

http://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/98583

You talk about how horrible mealworms are and link this study as your proof, but I read it and it says the opposite of what you just said. This study says that mealworms are the same as black soldier fly larvae for nutritional value and that both are very good for chickens. That gizzard damage you mention is only the case in dried mealworms, because the drying process chances a chemical in the mealworm shell to something slightly damaging to their gizzard, which adds up over time.