Whats Needed for Breeding Meal Worms?

[idesone]

I was wanting to know what i need to breed my own meal worms. How many meal worms should i use to get my colony started. I will be using the mealies to feed my 8 leopards. Also, how fast do they reproduce? Thanks in advance.

James

 

[ReptileMan27]

Not much, just take couple hundred and set them up in a seperate cage. Once they turn into beetles, they will mate and you should have babies eventually. Thats what I was told to do and did it and now have a few thousand mealies, wont have to order anymore right now .

 

[moosassah]

Keep them in a warm section of the house. Not your basement, not the fridge. This will help speed up the process. Once you have them to a size you want then pluck them & toss 'em in the fridge.

housing = a bucket, old fish tank, plastic shoe bin--nothing too big
moisture = carrot shavings, apple slices, potato etc
food = bran/high fiber cereals/oatmeal in a very crushed form or buy gutload
sift out using varying sizes of screens

I honestly can't remember how quickly they go from egg to meal sized.

That's all there is to it.

 

[GeckoConnection]

breeding mealies...

Short answer:
* 100 or so mealworms
* 2 sterilite shoeboxes (one for mealworms and one for beetles)
* 1 deli cup (for aliens)
* Bedding for the mealworms and beetles. Gutload is not necessary for them since you are not feeding them to anything. Gutload for the mealworms you are hatching and feeding only.
* Room temperature of about 80 or so (works to speed the process)

Long answer and how I do it:

I took about 100 from the mass I purchased and placed them in a shoebox size sterilite container with a bedding of oatmeal that had been through a food processor. I placed two baby carrots in the container for moisture. Every few days I would open the container and remove the 'aliens' and place them in a deli cup. I would then check the deli cup when I checked the sterilite box to see if any of the 'aliens' had turned to beetles. When I found beetles, I placed them in a sterilite shoebox container with the oatmeal from a food processor.

Every three weeks I take the rub with the beetles and dump it over a strainer. The oatmeal bedding falls through the holes and into a sterlite box which has my feeder mealworms. The eggs are in this bedding, and will grow in the box with the feeders. I mix in gutload and calcium powder to the bedding of the feeder mealies only.

I place the beetles back into the sterilite container with a fresh bedding of oatmeal from the food processor.

All this is done in my lizard area, where the room temp is about 80 degress all the time.

Hope that help,
Joe