Breeding mealie worms

[gecko_man2]

These little buggers are very easy to breed. I started with a thousand mealworms or so and now have a 6 drawer rack system with over 3000 beetles and over 100,000 mini mealies. I thought it would be a chore but it was really easy and I will have to start selling them in the spring or I will be over run.
I have pics but they will not load for some reason.

 

[GeckoMandi]

I just started breeding mine! No beetles yet though.

 

[Scott&Nikki]

I want to start breeding, but my leo won't touch mealies, and it seems kinda pointless for just 1 leo anyway.

 

[gecko_man2]

Yes that would seem kinda pointless. Do a small batch just for the fun of it. It is very interesting to see the cycles they go through. I just like to breed things.LOL. I had 14 geckos or so when I started to breed them, now I have 5 so I am thinking about either selling the mealies or getting a few mealie devourers bearded dragons.....!

 

[trizzypballr]

cool, just started breeding them myself, interrested to see how fast they breed, considering i go threw like 1500 mealies a week it would probley be a good investment for me to breed them

 

[Ishtar]

lol i have four beetles hoping something happens. doubt it but we shall see

 

[iceman]

ok i am breeding and a few of them molted and turned into these chubby white things

 

[crayolaskies]

The first time I tried to breed it was a disaster. There was too much moisture in the container, so the beetles all died. My second time breeding was a success though. I now have over 200 beetles still living and I'm starting to see the tiny mealies if I look real hard. :main_robin:

 

[trizzypballr]

thats good iceman, they are pupia (spelling?) they go from mealies to pupia to the beetles

 

[okapi]

Ive bred both mealworms and superworms. I like it but once I had an infestation of small flour beetles which breed like crazy and can fly around... Then to keep from getting them in my new tubs (I got rid of all my worms and killed every flour beetle I saw for like a month strait) I didnt do air holes... That made keeping moisture out a pain and the humidity gave me a huge mite problem... the bag of chicken mash that I bought was full of mites that had a population explosion every time it got too humid in the tubs... :main_angry: So I got rid of everything again and started with about 200 pupa. Then I got smaller leos and they are eating the worms faster than I can breed them now :main_thumbsdown: I think after new years Im gonna order a few thousand medium sized mealworms and start over again.

 

[jenkznza]

Here's a picture of the first rack we built to raise our Mealworms/Superworms in. We used concrete mixing tubs which are really easy to clean and sterilize between batches of worms. It worked really well. We labeled each tub with the date the beetles were put in the tub and the date they were pulled. Basically each week a tub was pulled and fed and a new tub was set up.