We bought 1000 live mealworms from West Coast Roaches through Amazon.com for $19.99 last year, then proceeded to raise some of them - until we forgot we had them - oops!
Very satisfied with the shipment. Very easy to raise- too easy in fact, that's how I forgot about them
We also did the cricket thing, starting with 300 stinky crickets from
Wal-mart, and discovered that once all the original crickets were gone, as long as you kept the dead crickets out, crickets barely stink at all.
Husband prefers raising crickets because of the quick turnover, I don't like the space needed nor the fact that the crickets we raised were hyperactive supercrickets compared to the ones we bought - even the chickens had trouble catching them. I preferred the mealworms because they took up so little space and needed only weekly attention...um...which I forgot. The mealworms we had did produce a lot of weird fluffy dust. We kept them in a mix of ground oats and chicken food, fed them sliced apple, lettuce, any ol' veggie or fruit scrap I had handy. Pretty much the same for crickets, except crickets went INSANE for orange slices. We would thread them on bamboo skewers and in 20 minutes they would be GONE, lol.
good luck
