Mealworm care??

Mealworm care??

Postby reptile » Sat Oct 31, 2015 12:48 pm

Hello Everyone!!
Due to the fact that I have a leopard gecko who refuses all food except mealworms (Which he dines on lavishly) I am faced with a small problem...

How do you keep them little beasties alive for a long time?!? I am currently housing them in an Exo-terra plastick faunarium, using bran as a substrate and giving them carrots, apples or potatos now and again. What housing do you use? And what do you feed them?

Also another thing is, is there some kind of rack system that I can build/buy to separate the bugs, worms and pupae? I have an idea using mesh so that the bugs lay there eggs directly into a seperate container but am not sure if it will work...

Pls help... Don't want to buy mealworms every month ;-)
Regards,
Reptile
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Mealworm care??

Postby Sico » Sun Nov 01, 2015 9:56 am

Your method should work fine, it does take some time to get the colony thriving, just be patient. Generally they like darker areas, I always just used a bucket with a lid, with some holes drilled in, and raised them in a mixture of bran, pronutro (plain) and normal flour, about 1/3 of each, with a couple bits of apple or carrot on the top for the adults and worms to get some moisture. Change your fruit out at least once a week to prevent it fouling and going mouldy, and stick the whole bucket in a cupboard or in your garage. They prefer warmer places than colder, and soon you will have plenty. I used to seperate them out using a sieve and ice cream tubs to make smaller colonies, with worms of various sizes, so you have several colonies at different stages of growth. you can always fish out some of the white pupae and put them into a new colony, I found there were times when the worms would eat the developing pupae - probably looking for moisture. A couple of empty egg cartons on the top makes some nice hiding places for the adults.
You can do a similar setup with roaches or crickets as well if you ever want to, a large bucket with shredded newspaper and plenty of egg cartons for them to hide in, and regular greens/fruit to feed them, soon you will have tons of micro crickets. I used to walk around after a rain and catch the large black garden crickets and breed those. Very sustainable food supply once it is going. It does get noisy, so definitely not something you want to keep in the house ;)
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Re: Mealworm care??

Postby reptile » Sun Nov 01, 2015 10:27 pm

Thankyou so much Sico... That is very helpful will definitly try that!! Do you know with how many worms you started off with?
85% of all snakes are harmless!!!!
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God made everything... It's all to perfect for it to be able to just appear
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Re: Mealworm care??

Postby Sico » Mon Nov 02, 2015 7:26 am

I started off with two of those tubs you buy at the petshops, into one 10l bucket.
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Re: Mealworm care??

Postby reptile » Mon Nov 02, 2015 1:36 pm

Ok thank you
85% of all snakes are harmless!!!!
0:1 Super Hypo Leopard Gecko
God made everything... It's all to perfect for it to be able to just appear
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Re: Mealworm care??

Postby Shampoo1014 » Wed Feb 10, 2016 7:40 pm

I also found that using potatoes and apples resulted in mold and it would kill them off. I found that carrots are their go-to crazy food. I bought two tubs about 3 months ago and kind of forgot about them (oops!) and I saw today that they had pupated and I have plenty of these 5mm long mealworms everywhere. I haven't even changed out the substrate since I got them. Bit of a fluke I guess. Good luck!
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