Raising Meal Worms for the Laying Flock (part 2)
I am now several weeks into my new venture of raising meal worms for the the laying flock. I picked up 250 “small” meal worms from our local bait shop and brought them home to try out their new container. The container (12″x12″) has an inch or two of bedding which is also their food.
There are dozens of videos on YouTube about raising meal worms by teenage boys feeding their reptiles. They all say to use a product like Quaker Quick Oats. So I decided to do a test. I put quick oats on the right (light colored) and chicken mash on the left. (Unfortunately my mash had already been mixed with cracked corn for the chickens. This shouldn’t hurt the meal worms but I don’t think it is food for them either).
I figured they would tell me which they prefer. Then I poured them out along the center line. They had come out of the fridge at the shop so they were slow, but they warmed up quickly and amazingly all disappeared into the bedding.
Next I added an apple slice for their “drink”. You can use potato, carrot, apple or greens. Within an hour this is what my set-up looked like:
The meal worms surfaced and began to consume the apples. They were ravenous! The apples were gone (except for the skins) by the next morning. Notice which side the majority are on– the mash side. As time went by the quick oats side was a barren desert. So I recommend using either chicken mash (unmedicated) or oats with the bran still in it, not instant.
At this point the container sounded like a bowl full of snap, crackle, pop–it was loud! About 4 days later the meal worms stopped moving and munching and I thought I had killed them all somehow. But then on day 7 I found my first pupa. Many of the meal worms surfaced and went “dormant”, then began the change to pupae. At 2 weeks (today) I have 100, or more than 1/3 of my batch, that have pupated.
The now-sluggish meal worms are on the left and are about 1″ long and a golden brown color. They shed their skin and out comes a shorter, white pupa with a distinctly alien look to it. The pupae, on the right, start almost translucent white (the guy at the bottom of the picture just shed his skin) and then they get darker with time.
Somehow I lucked out that these meal worms pupated so quickly. They can be at the meal worm stage for several months, shedding their skins over and over as they grow.
The next step is the beetles. Depending on ambient temperature the pupae can become beetles in as few as 6 days, or they can overwinter in this stage. My house is a little cooler than their ideal 80°, at 68°, so that will probably prolong the pupa stage a bit.
Each beetle can lay hundreds of eggs. To give you an idea of the potential, if my 200 pupae all become beetles with half (100) being females, and lay just 100 eggs, then I will have 10,000 meal worms! I can just hear the chickens clucking over that!
I will be back when I have achieved beetles.
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Julie Helms is unperturbed by her family who say helpful things like, “you want to raise WHAT in the house??” Anything for her beloved chickens! She blogs about living with sheep, chickens and goats at WoolyAcres.
