You may be wondering why one would want to raise mealworms. There are several reasons why I can think of why some NOT take an interest in breeding mealworms: they are worms! They are smelly, slimy, disgusting, twisted worms! They can come out and infest my house! Or those who have a bit of experience with these insects may suggest that they can easily buy them from a local pet store or even cheaper in bulk on the internet.

First, let me dispel the assumptions: they don’t smell bad, they’re not slimy, they don’t squirm, and I don’t think they’re disgusting. His climbing abilities are limited to non-slippery objects. They move slowly, so if you drop one, you can easily catch it.

Yes, you can order mealworms from a pet store. The Internet also sells worms for as little as $ 12,000! So why would I want to go through the hassle of raising them if I can buy them so easily and cheaply? Big question.

If you breed small reptiles like me, or have very small offspring like snake lizards, pictus lizards, or even chameleons, you should breed your own mealworms! You will find that breeding mealworms provides a wide variety of perfect sizes for these little reptiles. Young reptiles eat often! You must have a reliable supply of food of the right size for these young animals to allow them to grow at a healthy rate. When raising yours, you will have several sizes available for your animals.

To start raising your own mealworms, start with about 100 to 200 adult worms. Again, these can be purchased from a local pet store or even an internet company. A note that regular mealworms will metamorphose into a pupa and then the Darkling beetle.

Prepare bedding used to keep worms healthy using a generic brand of oatmeal and a dry baby cereal. The cheaper the better. I use oatmeal as a base for the medium. I like to add cereal as an additional food source for young mealworms.

Mix the two: 2/3 oatmeal in about 1/3 cereal. You’ll want to mix enough to have about an inch or two at the bottom of your container. This will become the base food of the worms. Additional foods such as potatoes, carrots, apples, kale, and other vegetables can be offered to provide moisture for the worms. The container can be a plastic shoe box, a sweater box, or another configuration that I will discuss later.

Once the oatmeal and cereal are mixed, add the mealworms. Add an egg carton to the top and bottom and you’re done. Worms use this egg carton to crawl over and under. Although mealworms don’t climb plastic walls, I place the boxes away from the edges of the box.

Keeping mealworms at a constant high 70 low 80 and you will soon start to see pupal development. I have found that with the medium mix described above and other foods offered, the worms will not bother the pupa. Some pupae may turn brown and die, but most should turn into beetles. If you want to maximize production, you can certainly separate the pupa from the worms.

After about 2 weeks of being a pupa, you will start to see some Darkling beetles appearing under the egg cartons. Again, I have not noticed any predation in my groups, even of the softest pupae by the beetles if they are well fed. Beetles are ultimately what you are looking for in a healthy mealworm colony. They lay the eggs to create new mealworms. The eggs are quite small and you will probably never see them as they are sticky and cling to bedding.

Eventually the container will be a mixture of substrate, egg cartons, mealworms of various sizes, maybe a few pupae, and certainly beetles. From this mix of activity, you can selectively harvest the mealworm size you want.

The above technique works well if you only need to feed a few animals. If you have more than a handful of animals, the best way to set up a non-stop mealworm factory is to use one of those plastic filing systems found at local department stores. Set up each container with a culture and it will extract mealworms of all sizes, more than you could use.

In this configuration, I have 6 drawers of mealworms (the middle container is used for vermiculite). I don’t use all the worms this unit produces. I let several containers mature to produce pupae, beetles, and eventually more mealworms.

I hope you give this elegant way of providing additional food to your animals a try. Be a little patient as it takes a little time to see those first micro mealworms.