Beyond the Basics

Keeping in mind that mealworms are hardy pests, all the general “rules” people have for raising mealworms are really just guidelines. If you stick within the best practices you should have success, but if you (like me) want to go beyond, here’s some info on not only the best practices, but some less than best practices I’ve been doing successfully.

Keep in mind that we are in a very dry climate here in Northern Nevada, and a lot of the people who preach to keep everything bone dry and never let the bedding ever get wet live in more humid environments.

Bedding

Best Practice

Bran meal is ideal. It’s cheap, sifts well, and is an all-around good food for the mealworms. Failing that, chick starter (non-medicated), corn meal, oatmeal, or bread crumbs, etc. Not flour or anything too fine, mostly because it makes handling the mealworms and sifting the frass harder.

Freeze your bedding for 2 weeks. Buy a bag of chick feed, bran meal, oat meal, etc? Freeze it to kill any little buggies that might be living in it already (like mites, pantry moths, etc.). You really don’t want anything other than mealworms living in it. If you have the space, toss the whole thing in the freezer and leave it there until you’re ready to use it. You could also bake it or microwave it but you’ll have to google the time and temperature to use.

If you’ve bought sifters (covered later in this document), presift your bedding so you can blend large pieces, or discard or use the super fine powder as part of the wet food rather than having it mix with the frass later.

Outside of best practice

You can really use any dried food for bedding if it’s ground fine enough. If it’s too fine it will fall through the smallest sifters, though. I dehydrate herbs from the garden, citrus peels, various fruits and veggie scraps, stale bread, etc., blitz it fine in the blender, and add it to my bedding. I still use bran meal as a base because it’s cheap and easy and I don’t have enough scraps to fill all the bedding with it. Oatmeal, although popular, is actually not a great bedding unless it’s blitzed in this fashion, especially once you want to start sifting your mealworms.

Feeding / Moisture

Best Practice

Carrots or potatoes. Sometimes other veggies or fruits as long as they’re not too moist. Replace before moldy. Some people replace them every day or every other day.

Outside of best practice

What can you feed mealworms? Anything. ANYTHING. Almost. They’ll eat Styrofoam but don’t feed them that if you’re gonna feed them to anything else. Although they aren’t the best or fastest composters, use them to consume your kitchen scraps.

• Citrus peels? They don’t like the orange/yellow hard part on the outside, but they’ll eat away at the soft white pulp on the inside of the peel.
• Onions? They’ll devour onions like anything else you offer.
• Steak? They tend not to like the fat, but they’ll eat the protein and this might boost their protein. I’ve heard though that you don’t want to feed them meat then feed them to another animal. I don’t know why, so if you choose to do it you're taking your chances. I do know many people feed dog and cat food to their mealworms to up the protein content and that totally has meat in it so I'm not sure what to believe.
• Tomatoes? Little watery, dry them a little before adding.

Note: I’ve found that the beetles tend to dislike some of the things the mealworms will eat right up, such as citrus peels. If I offer a food and the beetles run away from it, I’ll remove it and give it to the mealworms only.

I also don’t remove the scraps unless they either start getting moldy (rare), or they’ve dried up to a hard piece. Then I throw that hard dried piece of food in the blender and it becomes part of the bedding.

You can also soak veggies in water before feeding to really load up on water, or soak the dried up veggies to reconstitute them rather than blending them for bedding.

Probably bad practice

Ya know what? You can totally get the bedding wet a little. You can mix some clean bedding or chick starter (oh man they love fermented chick starter) with water to make a thick paste and set that on top of the bedding and watch the mealworms go at it. Once I accidentally gave enough to my mealworms that the whole box was a little moist for a day and everything was still okay. I think moist bedding makes it a more attractive food. HOWVER you really do want to keep the bedding fairly dry, the whole thing can go south pretty quickly and people have been known to lose their whole population when the bedding got moldy. I just want to impress on you that the rules are more like guidelines and mealworms are hardy and aren’t anything to fuss over; you just need to figure out what works for you. If you do throw caution to the wind, only do it with a portion of your mealworms so you can see what happens first! Moist bedding does attract pests, especially mites and fungus gnats and once your mealworms are infested it gets hard to get rid of them.

I have actually started to use a spray bottle to give water to the little ones because they can never finish the food I offer but they still need water. Sometimes I use it on the bigger ones, too, and it is working out really well. It dries for me in a few hours as long as I don't soak the bedding and just spritz the top.

EXCEPTION- Don’t get the beetle bedding wet. It makes it very attractive for them to eat if it’s wet and they will eat eggs along with the bedding.

A Word on Food

While it’s not really an issue for chickens, if feeding to reptiles you may want to be careful about what you feed your mealworms before feeding them to a reptile. You can maximize the nutritional value of your mealworms by doing something called “gut loading.” However I don’t do this for my chickens so you’ll have to google it to get more information on how to do this. If you feed something to your mealworms and you worry it might affect your animal, give it a few days and feed the mealworms better. I have heard that mealworms clean out fairly quickly. I don’t know the details on that, though.

Sifting Mealworms

At some point you want to remove the mealworms from their bedding and separate their bedding from the mealworm frass (poop). You can buy sifters online that will help with that.

The 1/30” size separates the mealworm poop from the bedding. New babies WILL fall through this size, along with very small powdered bedding. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BP3NRZG

You may want larger sizes, but the 1/30” will hold you for a long time. My personal sifters: 1/30”, 1/20”, 1/12”, and 1/8” but I regret buying the 1/8” because I almost never use it. Even the largest mealworms can squeeze their way through the 1/8” size.

I have also created my own sifters outside of that range.

• Pupae sifter, to separate mealworms from most pupae (but not all because sometimes the pupae are simply smaller than the mealworms)
• Large Mealworm Separator to separate the smaller mealworms from the usable size. Also works as a beetle sifter to separate beetles from their bedding.

If you’re interested, contact me and I can make you sifters as well. Price depends on size but probably like $15 for a sifter. They’re made from acrylic and are laser cut. I can make one that’ll fit inside the sifters from amazon, but I really like smaller hand sifters that don’t take up a lot of space.

Mealworm Poop/Frass Warning

Mealworm frass has been known to cause allergic reactions in some people. You can end up with an allergy over time with exposure to the frass. It is strongly recommended to wear a mask when sifting out frass, and probably gloves.

Mealworm frass makes an all right fertilizer that won’t burn your plants (2-2-2). Spread a light dusting over the soil and water it in or make a “tea” out of it to water your plants with. The real advantage of the frass is that it makes the plants think they’re being attacked by bugs and they’ll put up their defenses, effectively boosting your plants’ immune systems.