Breeding Mealworms

[Superior]

I heard somewhere that a female beetle will lay up to 500 eggs. If I start with 100, about 10% would die off (im guessing), and then if the mealworms are half male, half female, they would make about 20,000 mealworms. My question is...what do I do with all these? I only have one gecko to feed, and he would eat about 4500 a year. How many should I keep to keep the colony going? What size tub would I need, and how many? Correct me if any of my information is not right, I thought about this for maybe 5 minutes

 

[acpart]

I have never counted my mealworms, but I wouldn't worry about it. At the height of mealworm production last year, I separated out all the larger mealworms and "counted" them by weighing. I had counted out 100 and they weighed 8 grams, so I went with 80 grams per thousand. I figured I had about 3000 mealworms. If you end up with so many mealworms that they're turning into pupae way before you're ready to feed them, either see if you can supply other local reptile owners, or offer them for sale on craigslist. When I have extra I offer $2 per 100 counted or $5 for 80 grams/1000 (not counted). There are people buying mealworms for all sorts of interesting reasons, though I haven't sold to anyone operating a gourmet restaurant yet.

Aliza

 

[RepBex]

i feed my exess worms and pupa to birds

 

[moosassah]

I've purchased just over 2,000 mealies in 2 years. We feed 5 leos off of them. Our colony consists of 1 butter bucket of beetles, 1 small 8 cup round tupperware bowl of feeding-size mealies & 1 baking pan of colony. That's it. In 2 years, I've only needed to unload 1 time. I got rid of them on Freecycle.

 

[larry26]

Just wondering if i started breeding 200 but fed like 5 every day how many would i end up with?

 

[cwazy]

there are way too many ifs to give you an accurate #.... it would depend on the rate they are changing into pupae, survival rate, rate of pupaes that turned in to beetles, blah blah blah... rate this and rate that... really i dont think anyone is gonna have a real # that you could go on... best i can say is try it out, and figure it out... its all trial and error