Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Breeding Mealworms

Breeding your own mealworms is an easy way to save, and even make money. If done correctly you will have more mealworms than you know what to do with. After only a few months I was selling off thousands of mealworms to local reptile and bird enthusiasts. Below Ill describe everything that I used to get started. This is not the only way to do it, but I've tried many ways and found this to be the easiest by far.

What You Will Need

For your substrate, I suggest a hen laying pellet that has been ground up to a fine dust. I like the layer pellets because they are high in protein and vitamins. I also noticed that there were no bugs living in my tubs with the mealworms when I used it. When using wheat bran, I would notice bugs and roaches in my tubs constantly. If you don't want to deal with grinding pellets down, there is a mealworm substrate as well.

A regular blender will work fine to grind up the pellets, I use a magic bullet and it works awesome. I found this pretty cheap blender that got good reviews:

I use stackable Sterilite drawer system containers. These are small, if you are going large scale, you may need more units than I use.

A strainer is a very important tool for cleaning, moving and counting mealworms. You may need different mesh strainers depending on how often you clean and move your worms. Smaller worms will fall through larger mesh strainers.

For counting purposes, I use a digital scale. It is much faster to count out 50 worms and weigh them, than it is to count out 500 or 1,000 worms at a time. This is the scale I use:

Last thing you will need to get started is the worms themselves. A good starting number is 1,000, but you can order as many as you want. If you plan to feed out of your breeding stock, then I would suggest ordering more.