Building a Mealworm Farm

As many of you know I am starting to breed mealworms to give my chickens a nice and healthy little treat. Well, as a little time has gone by I am also breeding them to feed to tropical fish that I have in my fish tank. If you would like to check out my fish tank and ideas I have for it, please join my other page called The Fish Tank!

I know some of you are also looking to subsidize the cost of feeding your chickens in the winter and this is perfect! Your chickens will go nuts for them:) Not only that, but thus far they are really easy to breed! 

I've seen lots of different ways to breed mealworms but I think the way I did it in this video is going to work the best for me. It's all about low maintenance for me because I already have lots going on in my life and I cannot give these bugs 24 hours of my attention! LoL! 

 

To get started you're going to need some very simple things that you may already have or you can buy from just about any store to get this mealworm farm started.
  

 

Here is a list of the items from the video I made and other things you will need. 

• A Sterilite 3 Drawer Unit - 12"x12" 
• Metal screen made for screen doors. (Make sure it's all metal) 
• Hot glue gun and extra glue sticks.
• A box cutter. 
• A sharp knife. (just in case)
• A marker or a pencil to mark the top drawer where you're going to be cutting.
• Some scissors that can cut the screen.
• Empty toilet paper rolls or cardboard egg cartons. 
• Any cheap oats or you can feed them completely organic oats. 

 

 

I give mine carrots but you can use potatoes. If you use potatoes I would use them temporarily since they seem to mold up quite fast compared to carrots. 

 

In the video I use a piece of wood that was about 10" long x 1 1/2" wide. If you press that piece of wood against the wall of the top drawer on all four sides and mark them out you will have a 10" square in the middle of that drawer. Now that it's marked out you can begin to cut the whole in the top drawer. Make sure the top drawer is taken out of the unit and it is put on a flat surface before you start cutting. (Be sure to use heavy-duty gloves for safety) 

 

From there take the box cutter and follow the lines being sure to put pressure on the box cutter while you cut along the lines you marked. Don't go fast with this part, take your time and trying get a clean cut! 

 

Now grab your role of screen and cut out an 11"x11" square to fit over the whole you just cut. Put the screen to the bottom of that drawer and hot glue the screen to the bottom of the drawer covering that 10"x10" hole. At this point you can clean up any overlapping screen with your scissors then use something like I did in the video to give it a clean finished look:) 

 

The reason you want to do the top drawer like this is to help you automatically sort eggs and young larva out of the adult beetle area. If you don't do it this way it is likely that the adults will find the eggs and the larva and eat them. With the screen they will fall straight through into the second drawer and be safe from the beetles. Of course this also keeps the beetles in the top drawer because they cannot get through the screen:) 

 

From there you add about 2 inches of oats to the very bottom drawer and the middle drawer just getting them ready for the future. The top drawer where the beetles are should only have about an inch of oats. Gives them something to chew on. 

 

Put a few pieces of carrot in with your beetles and larva. They mainly use the carrot as a water source. Of course you don't have your mealworms yet so I would not put the carrots on the oats just yet however, you can add the cardboard egg carton or empty toilet paper rolls. 

 

Now that you're all setup it's time to order your mealworms!!! 

As many of you know you can get them through Amazon. If you buy through our link our page gets a small percentage of the sale that goes directly back to members in the way of giveaways so please consider buying here:)

 

Search Amazon for your mealworms here!

 

 

 

See my follow up blog and video coming soon! 

God Bless!! 

 

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