Raising Mealworms - best practices? How to prevent / stop grain moths to keep wife happy?

[ashcons]

KCNC06 has it. Freezing the bran is only going to delay those eggs hatching until ideal conditions, not kill them. You have to bake it. Baked mine and never had bug issues, though I have dealt with those little jerks before in other areas.

I gave up on mealworms because they weren't as productive/low-maintenance as everyone claims. My issue was maintaining ideal temperature and humidity for maximum reproduction and development cycles. If your mw pop is disappointing, I assume you're not paying it the attention it actually needs as I was.

Dubia roaches, on the other hand...I've got them dialed in for my kids' bearded dragon.

 

[KCNC06]

KCNC06 has it. Freezing the bran is only going to delay those eggs hatching until ideal conditions, not kill them. You have to bake it. Baked mine and never had bug issues, though I have dealt with those little jerks before in other areas.

I gave up on mealworms because they weren't as productive/low-maintenance as everyone claims. My issue was maintaining ideal temperature and humidity for maximum reproduction and development cycles. If your mw pop is disappointing, I assume you're not paying it the attention it actually needs as I was.

Dubia roaches, on the other hand...I've got them dialed in for my kids' bearded dragon.

I have our farm in our living room so I don't forget to check on the beetles and smaller worms every evening. I've only been at it a few months but my rotten ducks have gotten very used to their nightly serving of "wiggle worms" so hopefully I don't get burned out on farming mealworms. I figure if I can at least grow enough to cut back on the amount of worms I need to order it's a success. I keep the beetles in their own bin and then separate beetles from the eggy bedding every 2-3 weeks. Checking the eggy bedding to look for tiny mealworms is probably the highlight of my evening. Sad right? Nah. There are few things I enjoy more than listening to my bratty ducks when they're demanding their mealworms so seeing our farm produce worms is quite satisfying. And I'm really impressed with myself because a couple years ago I was so disgusted by live mealworms that I couldn't stand to go near them. Superworms probably helped with my worm fear except I'm still convinced superworms bite.
So far I don't think I've had much issue with keeping temperature and humidity at an ok level for them. We live in the southeast US so it's pretty much always humid here. I also have a whole house humidifier going in the winter. Humidity rarely drops below 55% in our house. I can't remember what humidity level mealworms want. I've been a little tempted to try putting my bin of small worms on one of my seed starter mats to see if a smidge more heat would help them grow faster but haven't tried that yet. The heat mats have little thermostat things so there's very little risk of overheating them.
Roaches...yikes. That may be beyond my bug line. Again, in the south so we have big ol' roaches around. I know they're different roaches but still. Yuck.

 

[ashcons]

I'm in a similar environment. Our AC keeps indoors humidity around there, I believe, but even then I had at least a 10% deformation rate on beetles going through metamorphosis. Heat would have also kicked up the reproduction rate, at least it helped tremendously with the dubia roaches. Those heat mats would probably be a great solution, but mine are all stuck under seedlings. Getting over your fear of bugs is impressive!

 

[Hip Hillbilly Acres]

Where can you buy oat bran? I checked both my area feed stores & neither sell it.

Local grocery store or amazon.com.

 

[Tereseb]

Happy new year!

New member here!

I've been raising mealworms on and off on a small scale for over a decade (2 shoe box plastic containers). But never getting what I think should be a good yield, taking a lot of time to deal with maintenance and one time, getting grain moths in the house and bombing our house. Then our dog got sick.

There's threads here that are loads of pages long spanning years. I've tried reading them, but often it's more debate rather than productive info. One person was pretty adament, saying stop lying, its not as easy as you are saying'. I kinda agree with that. Just buy the dried ones and be done with it?

This past summer, I got the bug to try again. My wife said to keep them in our shed. That's because a while ago, with the boxes in the basement, we wound up getting grain moths through the house (1 - 2 a day in 2400 sq ft house - is that a lot?). Bombing and being real careful with instructions / prepping the house, our dog still got sick (but fully recovered).

This year, I was getting 100 - 150 worms every few days (is that a lot or little for 2 shoebox size containers?) in the shed. a key thing was that I put several sheets of paper towels on top of the wheat bran, then put sliced carrots, potatos, apple cores on the bran and paper towels. Picking up the worms from the paper towels was easier than rummaging through the bran. Through the summer, I saw a couple grain moths in the shed. (I was freezing the wheat bran for a couple weeks before using).

I got her to let me bring them in the basement in the boiler room - nice and warm. I bought some 12 qt plastic containers from Walmart. have 3 containers gowing and getting 200 worms every few days (I pick up the larger worms. I leave the smaller ones. And there's loads of beetles I ignore. Started seeing a couple grain moths in boiler room. Put up flypaper / flyribbon - 4 of them. Caught about 15 over the last couple weeks on those and .saw 1 in kitchen last week.

I've started making sure lids are on the containers & the humidity has gone up - water drops inside the containers even. Yield has gone down. LOTS of beetles. No mold. As much as low temps lower yields, how about humidity? I leave the covers off for a couple hours /; change the paper towels / stir the bran.

I'm always intrigued how warm an area of bran gets when the beetles swarm / hang in the same area : )

Ever few weeks, I use my wife's wire mesh collander to screen out frass. a couple times I keep the frass in a spackle bucket for a few weeks and nothing starts groing in there - no eggs were in the frass? Eggs are on the bran?

Any thoughts on all that? Including:

1) How's humidity affect worm making?
2) Keeping grain moths out?
3) what is a good yield of worms for what size container?
4) how do you collect worms out of a container? just manually picking them out?
5) How often do you harvest from a specific container? Do you pick all the big worms? Or make a point to leave a % behind (ie, am I potentially overharvesting?).
6) I take some beetles from a container with a lot of them and put some into other containers with less activity - help refresh the family and cross breeding? Good or bad?
7) I took some of the wheat bran that was in the garage (but not having been in the freezer) and put in a closed container in basement. After 3 weeks, I don't see moths in there. Frustrating - I saw a moth IN a container only 1 time (I make a point to check 1 - 2 times a day). With the 15 on the flypaper I'd think I'd see more in a container. These are snap on containers - they get out that quick and easily?

THANKS

I've learned to get rid of Indian Meal Moths organically by using traps. I found this works best, after getting rid of anything the larva have contaminated. This is what I buy. I'd set up a few traps next to your meal worm farm. https://www.googleadservices.com/pa...GlHJ4XCqrTs4TFs3ToL1oSECAaU1hRe9W5CSu8DU7Y_-o