Alternate titles: Birds go wild for Beetles. Beetles final tour. Fowl turn for the worm. Bugs cry “not fare”.

Ok, so if you’ve made it through the puns, here’s the scoop. I’m done with growing mealworms. As the weather got colder, we started to have some beetle escapes. Then some more. I adjusted the wire mesh on the beetle drawer, but still they found a way out. The corner spiders moved down and tried the help, but only caught a couple.

The final straw was accidentally mailing my folks a live mealworm. They were good sports about it (they have chickens too, but one mealworm isn’t going to go far for 5 chickens), but that a worm escaped is a no go. The shallow drawer idea seemed good, because we could switch out drawers frequently and in theory have a steady stream of meal worms instead just of a glut, but alas, even the harvests every two weeks were meager.

To dispose of the experiment, I am taking a drawer at a time out to the chickens, starting with the egg producing beetles. The chickens were wary at first (it was an unfamiliar container), but quickly figured out I brought them treats. Interestingly, I have a couple chickens who do not like beetles. Huh. There were plenty of hens wild about them, though, so it didn’t take long to empty the drawer. There were even some mealworms for the non-beetle eaters. The left over oatmeal and cornmeal mix went into the compost bin.

It was an interesting experiment, and I can now pick up beetles and mealworms alike without squirming. My kids saw the lifecycle of the darkling beetle, and now I get back the square foot or so of floor space the drawer tower occupied. The price of the freeze dried mealworms doesn’t seem so bad now.

Here are the results of our current rotating 2 week mealworm harvest.

It is better this time, I had enough to divide it in half and put one half in the fridge for later. However, I think I will be just using cornmeal instead of an oatmeal and cornmeal mix. My strainer that will let the oatmeal pass through also lets mealworms pass through, and the strainer that keeps in the mealworms also keeps in the oatmeal. So, we’ll try omitting the oatmeal.

As it was it was easier to pick the mealworms out of the substrate with my fingers than to use the strainers. Yes, with my fingers. The mealworms aren’t slimy or cold, and only slightly wiggly.

I did find more pupa and transferred them to the pupa drawer, and I cleaned the dead beetles out of the beetle drawer. It is a good thing that some of the mealworms reach pupal stage, since I had about as many dead beetles as freshly emerged beetles. This is certainly an interesting experiment.

I really thought that my rotating meal worm drawers would yield a batch of large worms every two weeks or so once I had it going. But right now I have large larva in nearly every drawer. So today I started picking out the large worms to feed to the chickens. There are also beetle eggs hatching in the beetle drawer, but I think I’m just going to let those become beetles. If they survive the adults. I do separate the pupa when I find them.

My yield certainly isn’t what I thought it would be. I’m not sure if I didn’t start with enough beetles, or the house geckos have been getting in and having a smorgasbord.

We’ll continue the experiment for awhile because, frankly, it is hardly any work at all. I add wilted lettuce leaves for the beetles, and carrot peels and pieces for the larva, both of which are abundant at my house. I switch drawers once every two weeks, which entails putting oatmeal and/or corn meal in a drawer. It would be more work to take it all down.

I was starting to think that my mealworm setup was flawed. I set it up over two months ago, had beetles over a month ago, and kept checking the egg drawers and nada, nothing. I even threw out a drawer full because I figured it was too early for the beetles to lay eggs. Oops. The hatched mealworms are just TINY. I looked again and actually saw movement! I took a picture, circled the end of a mealworm, then when I put this post together, saw several more in the picture. Tiny. Smaller than a rolled oat. That the lettuce leaf (my darkling beetles like lettuce better than carrots) I had in the drawer now has holes was a good indication too. Ha!

We have darkling beetles, and it is a happy thing!

Some of the mealworm pupa have emerged as adult darkling beetles, which means we are well on our way to having our own mealworm farm.

I did put mesh screen on top of the beetle drawer, as well as the mesh on the bottom so the eggs can fall through to the drawer below. I wanted one extra precaution to keep the beetles from escaping. They are pretty chill beetles, really. Not very fast, like to dig down into the oatmeal and hide in the dark. I also had to hot glue in the mesh at the bottom because the little critters could crawl under the mesh. Oops.

We’ll see in a few weeks if any eggs hatch in the drawer below! We are switching drawers every two weeks. We have 8 drawers and the life cycle to pupa can be 10 weeks, so each drawer should collect eggs for a little over 2 weeks for us to have a near continuous supply of mealworms for the chickens.