Raising mealworms: what to do with excess beetles?

[ATRoos314]

I've been trying to find this information somewhere online and just can't find what I'm looking for. My daughter started raising mealworms for our chickens. We bought 1000 mealworms and they are starting to turn into Pupa. My question is: these 1,000 worms will turn into 1000 beetles that each lay 2000 eggs. I'm afraid we're going to quickly be overrun with worms and beetles. What can I do with these excess beetles so I can keep this colony under control? It sounds like it's not OK to feed them to the chickens or just release them into the wild. Do I just kill the excess and throw them away?

 

[JacinLarkwell]

You can feed the pupa to chickens. They seem to love them

 

[arishoks]

Take the pupa and feed them to the chickens. The beetles are also edible, but I believe they don't taste as good. Please don't release them, I'm not sure where you're located but it's never a good idea to release non native insects where they don't belong.

 

[kerbotx]

I really don't think you'll have a problem - they don't all survive, they don't all breed, all the eggs won't hatch,... And if you don't keep the different stages separate, there is a degree of cannibalism. You can also look into long-term storage, like drying them or maybe even freezing them. I personally feel like you can feed more live mealworms than the dried variety, but I don't have hard facts to back that up! Remember, they do slow down a bit in winter, and you could also force that by putting some live ones in the fridge now, if you can stand that.

 

[Bananer86]

I’ve just let my beetles be, but my chickens love their mealworms so I guess we really don’t have excess beetles. I try to feed the chickens a good bit of the pupa when I see them.. I think they like the pupa more than the actual worms now