Aussie Finch Forum

I recently bought a kilo of M/W and put halve each into two seperate containers with Pollard and food. At this stage there are heaps of beetles but no M/W, does this mean that they will lay eggs and I should get small M/W or has something else happened. It might be a silly question but this is my first effort at breeding them.

Cheers Greg.

The adults should start to lay eggs hopefully immediately!

Be sure to grab your mealworms before they turn to pupae and come out as beetles! Obviously you'll want to let a few move on to keep the breeding going, but they're pretty darn hardy and will no doubt proliferate as long as you keep them a little moist, and fed!

We've got a mealworm farm happening at my work, it's just a plastic container with a home made mesh lid.
Oat bran in the bottom with the mealworms, a chux cloth over the top and lightly sprayed with water daily.
We give them an apple cut in half about 3 times per week. It gets placed cut side down on top of the oat bran with the chux over the top.

Having just visited a great mealie set-up don't forget ~65% humidity is optimal for the best pupal turning and egg laying - an oft neglected factor.
He ran his set-up at 28degrees.

Even small-scale humidity is king - or queen depending upon yer viewpoint!!!

Well Bushranger where do we begin, I have mine in three types of containers. The first being enclosed crates the same size as milk crates that stack on top of each other with the handles/ holes enclosed with flywire and the top a peice of chip board/ malalmine to suit.

The next being the cheap plastic drawers you get from red dot, mine is a four drawer unit . works well but lest mice in for a feed.

The lucky last being 40lt cotainers with hole cut in an fly wire siliconed in to allow air flow and still be stacked up.

I am finding the plastic creates(milk create size) to be better as mine seem produce more in the dark, what I have done is , I have about 10 colonies at this point on the go but buy the weekend I should have more, you may find it better to get afew more creates and place the pollard in them , with layers of news paper and hession , I have carpet as my top layer. So as they turn into beetles move them across to the new tubs and then the colony starts I have about 50+ beatles in each,it takes roughly 2 months from egg to maturity and that also depends on the conditions, I also find having smaller colonies works better for me now , so if something happens to one I still have the other to rely upon. At my old house I had bigger fish tanks to house the mealies and it became to cumberson to keep them going.

All I feed mine are occaisionally apples but mainly carrot and banana peel, always make sure they dont go mouldy, did try dog buiscuts in with them but personally the jury is out on that one. But the main thing I have found is that when I kept them in bran it didnt do me any favours when cleaning them out gave me a bit of a weaze after, apparently bran isnt a real good medium so since I have been using pollard I have had greater success and makes it much easier to sieve them out from the mix.. well hope this is of some help...pete

I would be careful with the humidity theory,I am not saying it doesn't work, for others it probably does.But I have noticed when ever there is a reasonable level of humidity that you have a good chance of having a mite population explosion. They are the tiny mite that look like light brown dust.
Our Mealworm room is heated in the winter and cooled by an air con in summer,no water for humidity is added at all.
The worms are bred and reared in a mixture of Pollard and Bran. Moisture is provided with slices of Carrot.
Each beetle colony is sieved for eggs every 3 days at the moment. I am not saying my method is the best but it does produce a large amount of worms each week.