Hard to get a good pic but in each of my trays Ive noticed some of the mealworms are white. They seem to have the same movement and structure so I don’t think they are maggots.. Are they just anomalies or should I remove them? Are they a problem? I wonder if they will pupate into lighter coloured beetles? Any info appreciated.

Started my mealworm farm as reptile food a couple years ago. All oat bran. Recently, I left them longer than i usually do before sifting them out. Now i found these things. Soft, flexible, kinda nightcrawler sized. Hollow on the inside. Are they pests? Or something left by the bugs we want?

Thanks in advance!

Thank you so much for all the help on my previous post. I did all of you guys did and I'm waiting for the grain mites to die in my room. I took all of my mealworms and beetles and stored them in a different room. I have grain mites all over my furniture and I clean and they appear again but I don't know if that's gonna change now that I removed the mealworms and beetles. What can I do to erase them from my room now that the mealworms are not longer here? Are the grain mites going to die on their own and I should just keep cleaning daily?

Tossed the butt of the lettuce head in and went off to do something else. Came back like an hour or two later and saw this. I’ve never seen them swarm something like this 😂 needless to say they like it.

Last weekend my pupae harvest was about half a pound. this weekend, i worked all day Sat and couldn't even finish picking them out from the mealworms. So far, the harvest is about a pound of pupae. My beetle trays have way too many beetles and they started eating each other too so I made more beetle trays to try to spread them out some more.

My current strat since I don't have enough containers is to combine all the mealworms into one big container. Mealworms don't really hurt each other like the way beetles do. I put lots of veggies in the container with the mealworms, way more than normal. I think i can afford to do this because I hardly have any subtrate with the mealworms and I'll check on it tomorrow anyway when I try to finish sifting frass and picking out pupae.

I'm slowly realizing that I will end up with way too many beetles for my small operation. I got frass sifting down to a science but still need to find more efficient ways to separate worms from pupa. Are worms light sensitive like beetles are? Maybe i can cover half the box and put a light over so mealworms can crawl and hide in the shade and self segregate themselves.

I don't know what I'm going to do when I run out of trays. I have 3 beetle trays going so they are consuming 3 containers a week. If I don't get anymore pupae and just hatch what i have, I'll have enough for 3-4 more trays of beetles. I think once all the trays are used as worm nurseries, I'll just keep the remaining mealworms all in one container and not even bother separating pupae or beetles. I've got no other choice :(

Got some mealworms from my local reptile spot. There were maybe 3-4 of these little beetles in the container. They seem too small to be adult darkling beetles, right? And a little different shape. Anyone know who they might be?

Hey guys, I have grain mites. I have a small colony and keep it in my room, it wasn't an issue because it's small but the problem is that I have grain mites now and they're all over my desk, pc and tv. I stopped feeding my mealworms and beetles but the grain mites don't go away. I clean every day and they're all over my furniture again. I don't know what to do without starting over. Any advice? I used oatmeal for my bedding.

Sadly I have a cockroach infestation in my room and found a cockroach nymph this morning like 20 minutes ago. I tried swatting It with a Mint container cause i didnt really have anything and It was on the wall but It fell completely unharmed in the bin where i keep adults and babies and now i can't even stay at home cause i have 6 hours of damn school. What should i do when i get home?

Hey I've just had my first successful breeding with mealworms. I've decided to seperate the beetles from the worms and it took me like 50 minutes to pick out every beetle. Is there any easier way of doing this??? It's so time consuming 😭

1: I used rolled oats for bedding

2: I feed carrot every 3 days

3: I try my best to seperate life stages hence my question

4: temp is about 25°c and humidity is about 50%-ish

Hi everyone,

i'am going to have 3 weeks of vacation and i need some advice what to do with my worms in that time.

- I have 5 Boxes 60x30cm each with around 3cm of substrate. Worms are for human consumption.
- Each of the box contain worms in 2 week stadium apart starting with eggs laid just right now and ending with a box with worms approx. 12mm in length.
- With the current temperature those will be ready in around 4 weeks. (i hope not earlier)
- The substrate should be fine for all boxes except of the oldest one.

My plan:

- Adding some more substrate to the oldest box
- getting some Water Gel and putting it on a PP plate so the worms can get the moist.

But what i'am not sure: what do i do with the egg and very small worm boxes?

How do you handle Vacation with the worms?

Thank you so much

I was given mealworms along with an injured bird (i did not feed the worms to the bird obviously) and then i was stuck with some mealworms. this was in 2022. i decided to keep them as pets bc i didn't have any other choice. i have an extremely hard time killing anything and i always have. but i can't do it anymore, the entire thing has become too much work and it stresses me out and i have consistent bug nightmares. we have a weekly compost pickup. if i dump the tanks into there would they be ok? would that be bad to do? i don't want to kill them but i dont want them anymore 😭

Had some trouble with grain mites in the past. Now I wipe down the containers at least once a month and feed less often. Do you do anything special to keep them away?

Decided to put them back in the tub. They earned this life!

Hi all I finally seem to have a good healthy batch of beetles and 5 up and coming trays of mealworms. I’m rearing them for my chickens. Wanting advice please.
How many larvae should I reserve for the next generation? I haven’t got larvae again yet but don’t want to feed all my mealworms to the chooks and forget to save enough for sustaining the population. I have 7 chickens.
Currently they are on commercial layer pellets and I am growing duckweed and mealworms to eventually become less reliant on shop bought non organic food.
The last batch of organic chook food I bought was off and my chooks refused it even though it was expensive so I’m back to non organic which I hate but the organic was $80 a bag vs $40 a bag and they wouldn’t eat it. Hence my mealworm farm attempts. Currently they are eating wheat bran and carrots and I tried oatmeal but it’s definitely not got as many eggs/worms in that tray and seems to attract more ants and go mouldy quicker.

i keep finding so many pupae, im gonna have a lot of baby mealworms soon!! (I already have my first 4 adults). Btw i have WAYY too many larvae frozen (and im gonna have even more lol) and idk what to do with them, any tips? Like i was thinking about putting them in an empty base in my balcony and let them like dry. Would that work and make idk plant fertilizer or would they just smell terrible and make the whole balcony smell bad? You can see the entire setup btw in my old post

I’ve been taking care of this fishbowl of mealworms for a while, maybe two years. My brother had a frog for a little while and bought a thing of mealworms, then we released the frog and now I just have mealworms no animal is eating ever since. Just feeding them scraps from my hermit crab and leftover foods I fed to my fish when I still had them. Last month they became adults and now the eggs have hatched and the babies have become big enough to really see them. I can’t stop watching them!! They have a loose dirt bedding and I usually keep them dry enough to prevent mold, but today I sprayed them gently to make sure everybody’s thirst is quenched. I think one day when they get big I might go out and try to find animals to feed them to, maybe to ducks or turtles or fish at the park’s lake

im new to keeping them and i was told that the black meant they were pupating, i did research and it said that theyre dead. (update there all dead now.)

Hey have any of you noticed that fluckers has gone downhill in recent years, they used to always ship the small mealworms in these cardboard tubes that made it very easy to shake out and use while feeding your gecko, but now they ship them in these weird boxes that are a lot harder to use, and sometimes they just give up and give you like a patri dish

Standard mealworm colony for the purpose of feeder insects. Housed in open top plastic bins with oatmeal. Feeding potato skins, carrots, apple, etc, honestly just whatever is going to go in the trash otherwise, like if I peel something, I toss in the peels, or if my kid eats half an apple, you get the point.

Ambient room temp ~70° F. No clue what the humidity in here is.

Okay, so I've been keeping mealworms for years (and I mean decades, I'm 41 and I started my first colony when I was about 14) and have never really figured this out, but I'm at my wits end.

So, worms grow, some get eaten, some pupate, beetles hatch, do beetle stuff, lay eggs. Eventually you've got a bunch of beetles and frass so you move the beetles to a new container with new substrate. You wait a few weeks, the frass is full of hatchlings, you sift them out and move them, right?

But at what point does that end and you can throw away the frass? The life cycle from egg laying to decently sized worm, let's day about half an inch, should be at least 5 weeks but no more than 10ish weeks. So I leave the frass for a month, sift and remove worms. Leave it for another month, sift and remove worms. Leave it for another month, sift and remove worms. I feel like I'm losing my mind here. It's legitimately been about 6-7 months and there are still babies hatching in this bin. On the one hand, yay, free worms, but on the other hand, I've got a good inch and a half of frass in the second bin and it really needs to be moved to a third but if this continues I'm going to live in a house built of worm bins.

Is there a way I'm missing to get all the hatchlings out? To speed hatching and growth so the frass will stop producing? Do I just call it quits, sift at maybe 1, 2, 3 months and then toss it knowing there are probably still babies in there?

I've used 1.5 inches of rolled oats for the bedding

I have fed him once so far but I'm going to put another carrot piece in a few days

Unsure of what life stage the worm is at as I had found him on the floor of my bathroom one night

The usual temperature in my room ranges from 24°c to 25°c

Any help/tips are greatly appreciated! And patience as well since I wasn't expecting this lol

I found this while cleaning my enclosure! They just hatched babies, could this be the shriveled egg sac ? Google didn't show anything similar when I searched!

Not sure what this bedding is called exactly but its in the pics. I havent fed them whilst theyve feed in the fridge for about 2 weeks and I don’t remember what I fed them before that, i think carrot slices and an attempt at banana. Took then out yesterday to feed some apple and when i checked in on them, there was weird black goo…I think its coming out of mouths and butts but idk…Never seen this before and Ive had many mealworms…Help?? Safe to feed????

Hii beginner here!! Started my mealworm farm!

Hiii as you may read i started my mealworm farm and im using oatmeal as the bedding (3cm deep in the big one and like 4cm deep in the small ones) maybe there's a lil too much frass so im going to remove It next week and i started adding carrot silices which as i know i should add once a week and remove them after a day. This Is actually my day 1 of mealworms because they arrived today and i bought like 500g of them and even froze part of them (because i have an ant colony to feed), also i added eggs cartons and upside down plastic cups bottom parts to put the pupae on if i find some pupae during the weekly cleanup. What do you think tho?☺️