How to Save Money by Breeding Your Own Mealworms and/or Superworms

Tired of paying ten bucks each time you need some mealworms? This can really get expensive over time. Think about it: you have to determine the quantity you need, drive out to the store, buy either a few dozen or a few hundred (for some reason they either come in two quantities: a few, or what I like to call the Costco solution: more than you’ll use in two lifetimes). Or you get all the way to the store and they don’t have the size you need, or they ‘just ran out.’ Conversely, you decide to order your mealworms online to avoid these issues. So then you have to pay for shipping, taxes, and wait a week to receive them. A great solution to these expensive problems is to breed your own. It’s very inexpensive (the method below cost me $7.00, and I have mealworms for life!), they are always available, and you can pick the sizes that you need. Moreover, you can be assured of the quality of the mealworms because you produced them yourself! It’s easier than you think, just follow these steps:

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Materials: 100 pet store meal worms 1 box of wheat germ or whole oats 1 plastic sweater box container with lid (Sterilite, Rubbermaid, or Iris brands) 20 small deli dishes with lid 1 potato

1. Gather the materials. My only expenses were for the sweater box (for sale at Walmart for $3.99), and the mealworms (at my local pet store for 2.99). I snagged a large box of of oatmeal (not instant...the whole oats) in our pantry, and happen to have potatoes growing wild in my yard. If you don’t happen to have potatoes trying to take over your garden, you can substitute baby carrots, apples, pears, etc. The only other thing that I did was grabbed a couple of the small deli dishes with some lids. You can find these at restaurants-they are the small disposable cups that you get when you ask for salsa or sour cream with your ‘to go’ order. I like to poke a couple of holes in each lid with a safety pin.

2. The next step is to put everything together. I pour the bag of oatmeal into the sweater box about two inches high. Then I add in the meal worms. I put two slices of the potato in with the mealworms and put the rest of the potato back into the refrigerator. The potato allows the worms to drink (and you can substitute with any of the other fruits or vegetables mentioned above). I put the lid on to the mix and put the sweater box in a low traffic area (such as on top of a cabinet in the laundry room) for a few days. Every 3 or 4 days I’ll replace the potato slices with some fresh slices. After a week, I take a few of the largest meal worms and separate them into those deli cups (one in each). I have found by separating individual worms they will turn into pupae faster. I also start sifting through the bran to look for mealworms that have already turned into pupae. These look like little white aliens (or grubs)...hard to describe, but you’ll know it when you see it! You want to separate these out into the deli cups (one in each cup) as well. Once you have about twenty pupae separated, you will notice that your first pupae have started to turn into beetles. These beetles lay the eggs that hatch into the baby mealworms.

3. It takes about a week for the once the pupae start to convert into beetles for them to be fully developed. Once this happens, I put the beetles back into the sweater box with the original mealworms, and the cycle starts all over again. Every few months I sift the mealworms and beetles out of the box to dump the waste and replace it with fresh oats. Once you have this cycle going all that you have to do is pick (or sift out) the size mealworms that you want!

4. Now sell or give your excess mealworms to other hobbyists that use them!

Tips & Warnings

• Keep your mealworm colony at room temperatures (between 60 and 78 degrees F).

[bfreethree]

on 7/21/2009 This was both yucky and informative. Thanks 5*