Way back in February, I set up a mealworm farm. I bought a big plastic container with a lid that has ventilation holes and filled it with wheat bran and about 500 mealworms. Toss in a piece of potato or apple for moisture and voila, you've got a mealworm farm.
I had it on the kitchen counter for a few days before my DH said it had to go into the garage. And I knew that mealworms wanted to live in darkness so it seemed fine. But it was a painfully slow process waiting for them to pupate, turn into beetles, lay eggs and for baby mealworms to grow.
Turns out, while they do want to be in the dark, they want to be warm too. Keeping in our garage was simply too cool this winter and spring. Now that it's finally warm out, they are reproducing and growing up quite rapidly. I've pulled out a few full sized worms over the past few weeks for the girls. But today was the first day that I gave them a scoop of worms.
They are still on the small side. And I need to be sure to sift out the worms so that I'm not loosing any eggs when I scoop them out for the girls. Now the challenge is figuring out how to set aside a ration of worms that will grow up into beetles so the cycle continues.
I also have to figure out a way to smuggle the tub back into the house come fall when the weather turns cold again. I was pondering this when someone suggested storing it along side the vacuum cleaner. Which is brilliant. It's a dark closet. It's in the middle of the house where it's warmest. And my DH will NEVER find it there.
Unless he reads my blog.
I over harvested my bins last winter and basically had to start over with a 5,000 worm order from grubco.com. The birds loved the big worms this spring. I used 2 bins for feeding the birds and 1 as the next gen. Since I use the plastic sweater boxes I can stack mine out of the way. Right now most of the beetles are dead and the bedding is shifting like sand. Thousands of baby worms are growing for my birds.
ReplyDelete~~Matt~~
Yes, that's exactly what I'm afraid of. Over harvesting.
ReplyDeleteI like your two bin approach. And I have an old sweater bin. I think I'll sort out a bunch and set those aside. This way, I don't keep saying, oh, one more scoop for the girls and the next thing, I have no more worms.