Cleaning out mealworm colony?

[sablebeauty]

Apparently using a drainer doesnt work for me lol, the worms still get stuck in the holes and if I get one with larger holes the dead bugs get through and then I have to pick out all the live bugs.

How do yall do it?

 

[fuzzylogix]

sifter, tweezers, and a lot of patience, lol...

im wondering the same thing actually. it takes me a couple of hours to sift and seperate thousands of mealies.

 

[sunshinegeckos]

i dont have nearly as many as most but right now I use tweezers and a sifter. I also do daily maintenance to keep it from getting to bad and then do a weekly changing of bedding.

 

[acpart]

I don't mess with them that often. I use a strainer and find that the small ones go through the holes,the big ones stay in there and a few get stuck in the holes. Every month or so I sift into another container. The ones that fall through I consider too small to feed. I leave them in their bedding and add more grain. The ones that stay in the strainer I dump into my feeding container. The ones that get stuck in the holes get out with a little poking. There's no way I'm going to spend the time picking through everything, especially with thousands of mealworms.

Aliza

 

[fl_orchidslave]

I use a couple different sized sifters, one for large worms, another for small. Just a few get thru the sifters, and I grab them out with feeding tongs. Sometimes I do a partial sift on the bin of supers, to tidy it up a bit. Changing the beetle bedding every 3-4 weeks is more time consuming and done by picking the beetles out.

 

[sablebeauty]

I guess I'm trying to find a way to keep from having to pick out all the worms from the dead beetles, etc lol -- so then no one has found a way other than tweezers?

 

[fl_orchidslave]

Pick out the beetles, leave the worms in the bedding, put beetles in new bedding while letting eggs hatch and worms grow.

 

[ElapidSVT]

i use classifiers made for gold mining. they stack, come in many different mesh sizes and fit on top of a 5 gallon bucket.

back in the old days, they'd put burlap layers on top of the bedding and mist it. the worms would collect between the layers and were easily harvested by hand

 

[acpart]

Where do you get those classifiers?

Aliza

 

[sablebeauty]

i use classifiers made for gold mining. they stack, come in many different mesh sizes and fit on top of a 5 gallon bucket.

back in the old days, they'd put burlap layers on top of the bedding and mist it. the worms would collect between the layers and were easily harvested by hand

Where did you get these?

 

[ElapidSVT]

gold mining shops carry them. or online. the ones i use are made by keene industries.

http://www.google.com/search?q=keen...ct=mode&cd=5&ved=0CC0Q_AUoBA&biw=1094&bih=710

 

[sablebeauty]

So then I just cant go to Home Depo and get some lol, okay.