Breeding Mealworms

[Tiaris]

I purchased a kilo of mealworms about 8 weeks ago to breed some up prior to obtaining some softbills. I used plastic drawers from the reject shop & divided the kilo into 5 roughly equal colonies in each of the drawers. Each drawer has about half a bucket of pollard and a triple layer of hessian on top. With the warming weather they turned fairly rapidly into beetles. Following advice from E.orix to separate the beetles from their eggs/young into new boxes regularly, I did this as soon as young mealworms were evident (which took less than 2 weeks each time). I now have 23 boxes of juvenile mealworms each with thousands of mealworms and am just about to setup the beetles into another 10 boxes to expand further. The bottom line is that within 2 months of obtaining a kilo of mealworms I'll have many kilos of mealworms when these ones mature. I doubt that this rate of breeding could have been achieved had I not separated the beetles into new boxes.

[E Orix]

Tiaris
You are on the right track.
At the moment we have 10 breeding colonies of Beetles sieved every 2 or 3 days. We use Pollard as it is finer and sieves easily plus its a little more nutritious.
Moisture via Carrots only. The eggs and Pollard are put into plastic cube boxes 1/3 filled with Bran .Currently we are using 80 of these boxes. The whole lot is stored in an insulated heated/cooled room(28c)Beetles and worms will eat the eggs without a problem. The eggs are tiny and stick to the Pollard.In the raising box we use Bran as it doesn't compact down as much as Pollard.
We put 2 or 3 of the sieved product into one cube,it depends on how many Beetles there are in the colony and how old.
How many do we breed,many kilo's.

[RodBacon]

Here I go kickstarting an old thread again, but I've found a lot of good info here and don't want to start things afresh!

I am going to start my own mealworm colony at home, and have seen a "filter" setup that some people have used which is supposed to enable the eggs to fall through to a drawer below the beetles (See http://www.scorpion-forum.com/t5156-mealworm-farm-diy as an example). I was thinking of building one like this, but was wondering if anyone else here had tried this method, or do most people manually separate the various stages?

[vettepilot_6]

Here I go kickstarting an old thread again, but I've found a lot of good info here and don't want to start things afresh!

I am going to start my own mealworm colony at home, and have seen a "filter" setup that some people have used which is supposed to enable the eggs to fall through to a drawer below the beetles (See http://www.scorpion-forum.com/t5156-mealworm-farm-diy as an example). I was thinking of building one like this, but was wondering if anyone else here had tried this method, or do most people manually separate the various stages?

its a good idea too...i usually just sieve them.. might try that way...its very neat way to do it (keeps the missus happy if neat and tidy lol)

[BOF33]

Its a great setup! I will be employing the same design with my colony

Thanks for the link

[RodBacon]

I guess we'll all be working on them together! I've just seen a 3-tier plastic tub setup on wheels at our local crazy bargain type shop for about $15, which looks like the ideal candidate for butchery. Will take photos of my project build.

[Stu]

An alternative to cutting out the entire base is to make numerous holes using a hole saw.
Allows the plastic box to maintain some strength.

[RodBacon]

An alternative to cutting out the entire base is to make numerous holes using a hole saw.
Allows the plastic box to maintain some strength.

That's a good call Stu. I'll make that call when I see how thick/strong the tub is. I guess I could also cut out 4 squares, leaving a "cross" in the middle for strength in either direction. Again, this place is full of good ideas!