What's wrong with my mealworms?

[Sue and her hens]

Early on I tried the beetle bin with mesh in the bottom method,. but it was a pain to deal with so I abandoned it. Instead, When I collect pupae from my mealworm bins, I add them to the current pupae bin until the bottom is full.... no substrate I lay a couple paper towels over the surface .... beetles will crawl onto those and it makes it easy to just lift out each towel and shake it into the beetle bin. I initially spritzed a little water on the paper towels, but have found that I ended up with a lot of dead, grey, squishy pupae.

About every two weeks, I move the egg cartons in the beetle bins to new bins with about 2" of wheat bran, and then use a sifter to lift the beetles out of the original bins and into the new ones. This leaves the eggs that were laid in the original substrate plus the frass. Usually the bran in those bins is pretty much gone, so I add about an inch of bran I've recovered when I've sifted worm bins for frass. It's already been chewed up a good bit by the adult worms so it's easier for tiny worms to move around in once they hatch. For the first two weeks, I lightly mist the bin with water once a day and stir up the bran to make sure it's loose and fluffy. Typically I start seeing movement in the tray and the sifter by about day 10-14. At that point I start adding a veggie source for moisture.

Beetles will eat both eggs and baby worms so you don't want to leave them in the original bins too long because that will reduce your worm production.
I date the beetle bins and retire them about 2 months later.... those go out to the hens. I start a new beetle bin (new beetles from pupae) about every two weeks as well. I typically have 6 or 8 active beetle bins going. This helps keep the worms in each bin close in age, which makes sorting worms more efficient.

There is a learning curve involved when it comes to raising mealworms. It's not rocket science, but there are a lot of variables to juggle and it can take some time to get a schedule going that works for you and your farm.Just today I found a beetle bin that had gotten pushed to the back of a shelf for too long, the bran was gone, and a bunch of beetles had died. I sifted the beetles out, separated the live ones and put them in a new bin. I sifted out baby worms and added those to a tray with similar sized worms and added some ABC (already been chewed)) bran to the egg bin.

If you use Facebook, there is an excellent group there that offers a lot of information about mealworm farming. Feel free to message me if you'd would like more information about it.

 

[BarnyardChaos]

Thank you! I messaged you for the link to that group. I will be sifting and sorting today, and hope to find baby worms already. The one mealworm I had left has disappeared, and I can't find the pupa (yet). And I checked a bin that just had bran in it, sifted from my first batch and thought it was clean. I found two beetles.

How many trays do you have for your rotation schedule?

 

[Sue and her hens]

I started with about six 9x13" plastic bins from Dollar Tree.
A few months in I scrounged a 10 drawer cart. I have continued to add more DT bins as I needed additional beetle and worm bins. Over the weekend my husband built me two racks to hold some of the bins vertically to save some space.

For me, your bin drawers look way too big to be manageable because it's going to take a long time to sift bins that size.

I'll try to send you some images... at the moment my network is not cooperating in moving the images from my phone to my desktop though.

 

[dennisma1]

In my limited small mealworms farm yes they would get stuck up top with the beetles sometimes... most eggs seemed to fall through. . I would occasionally replace the beetles oatmeal. It was def harder to replace the bottom layer because you can't really see the eggs. As someone who had tiny mealworms escape on to ceilings and walls when there home got cracked ( woops) I was alarmed to hear you had large ventilation holes. I only had holes (intentionality) in the top of the beetles cage. They didn't seem to be climbers. the screen mesh seemed to keep baby worms in ok. once they were bigger they just hide in their oatmeal and didn't cause trouble.

 

[BarnyardChaos]

I was alarmed to hear you had large ventilation holes.

Thanks for your response. I'm learning all I can. My son warned me so sternly about mold on the vegetables, so I opted to leave the handholds open for air. No worms have crawled out of anything, but I occasionally find a beetle or two in the other bins. Not sure whether they escaped their own bin, or simply hatched. Meh. It's all good, so far!

 

[WI chickens]

I do this a lot differently than many people, so my advice is worth what you paid for it

This is the substrate/food mix I use to raise a large number of mealworms:
2 parts high quality dog food
1 part chicken layer crumbles
1 part alfalfa pellets

I grind all of this up with a Ninja blender. It's a pretty hard mix to grind, and I use ear protection. I put 3 or 4 inches of this in a "clear" plastic bin, and I raise the mealworms in it without a lid. I only use large water storing polymer crystals to water them. I give them very little extra food. The mold and mess are not worth it and they get all they need from the food mix.

I have raised several hundred thousand mealworms this way. In my experience, as long as they have proper humidity and temperature (about 75-80 F is best I think) they breed very fast and are healthy. I use mine for reptiles, so I feed them very high quality food. The mealworms themselves don't have a lot of nutrition I believe. I look at them as little holding vessels for the nutrition from the food I give them.

Good luck to you.

 

[LovePBandJ]

Following along with your adventure. I’m just starting my first farm today.

 

[Tonyroo]

You can get them to drink with orange and grape slices. And it won't mold fast. The acidity prevents it.

 

[BarnyardChaos]

Progress report:
All is going well, I think, in spite of less-than-optimal temperatures in the room where I'm growing the mealworms. It's in a garage bathroom, where the only heat is a small oil-filled radiant heater. Depending on weather, temperatures fluctuate between 60-70 deg F, but the mealworms seem to be doing okay. Keeping humidity up is a challenge. I've got a large dishpan full of water in the shower stall with them, and i dampen a towel with it once a day or so, and drape that over the mealworm tower. It keeps humidity at about 40-50%. Not ideal, but it's what I can manage, and they seem to be doing okay.

Bin #1 is full of healthy, active larvae - which are soon to pupate. I've found one pupa so far, last week while sifting. It is fascinating to see that when I add fresh veggies to the bin, within a few hours those completely disappear below the wheat bran. Thirsty little buggers. Bin #2 (one month younger) are doing well, too. Bin #3 is collecting eggs below the Beetle bin. All will be rotated next week and Bin #4, my last, will be set to collect eggs. My pupae bin has one solitary, lonely little pupa. So far. I've got things set for a 30-day rotation, on the first of the month every month. But now that pupae are appearing, I'll start sifting once a week.

The beetles hatched from the very few survivors of my first mealworm order seem to be very industrious and active. (I've found few dead ones so far - maybe they're being eaten? I dunno...) From the evidence in Bins #1 and #2, they're prolific egg layers. I'll keep them going as long as they live, until Bin #1 produces a good amount of pupae and they start hatching. Then it's treats for the chickens, and I can say I'll have filled every bin and established a good colony. Yay!

I've been feeding slices of potatoes, celery, carrot sticks, and occasionally apples and banana peels. No trace of mold so far. The potatoes turn black, but that's just oxidation and not mold or I'd see it on the other veggies, too.

I almost hate to think of feeding these little buggers to the chickens, after nursing them and worrying over them every day. They're almost like pets. Weird, I know.

 

[LovePBandJ]

I’ve made my drawer system ands have ordered my starter mealworms (500).

I happened to have an excess of cornmeal, so I hoped to use that as substrate, moving to the bran once the cornmeal is gone. Will this be an ok substrate to start with? I’ve heat-treated the cornmeal.