Tasty Snacks you can grow for your Little Raptors
Mealworms! Stop buying those imported skins and feed your birds nutritious, homegrown worms. Find out how easy they are!
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Carey: 0:00
Hi, and welcome to the Poultry Nerds Podcast. I'm Carey Blackmon, and I'm here with my co host for the show, Jennifer Bryant. And we're here to help you figure out how to raise the healthiest, happiest and highest quality birds possible.
Duncan: 0:16
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Carey: 0:40
All right, so today we're going to talk about mealworms. Now I know you don't anymore. But you used to have a rather ridiculously large millworm farm.
Jennifer: 0:54
I did. It was stupid large, actually.
Carey: 0:58
That's about it. Because a lot of people want natural, healthy treats for their birds. And mealworms are great.
Jennifer: 1:08
So I just started the mealworms because I wanted to give treats to my ducks. And then mealworms became so easy to farm, actually. You can do it inside, you can do it in a chair, you can do it, listening to music with a glass of wine. Mealworm farming is actually really relaxing. A little tedious, but fairly relaxing. And and why not? And then I didn't fully understand. I just was going through the motions at the beginning. And I was like, eventually this should make sense. I'm going to grasp it. And about the time that it made sense, I had 200,000 mealworms. And I know that's hard to hear, but they multiply pretty darn quickly. So you have to get your start from somewhere. A mealworm is simply the larva of the darkling beetle. So if you have darkling beetles in your feed or in your barn, just, Pick them up and throw them in a bin and you'll have a mealworm farm in about a month or so. But if you don't have any darkling beetles laying around, then you just can order some eBay, Midwest mealworms, just several different locations you can order a starter pack from. and then you just throw them in a bin with some, I used wheat bran because it's easy to sift and it's really inexpensive. I assume it's still an inexpensive. But if you don't have any, I mean you can use oatmeal, you can use chick starter, you can use lots of stuff. And then
Carey: 2:50
wheat brand, I want to say the last 50 pound bag I bought was like 16 bucks.
Jennifer: 2:56
Yeah. And in a huge mealworm farm, a 50 pound bag is gonna last you a long time. It lasted me months. So what the premise of the farm is the darkling beetle lays an egg. And that egg grows to become the mealworm, which is really the larva of the darkling beetle. And then once it's mature, it'll pupate. And it looks like these little white aliens, basically, and they wiggle around. And After about seven to 10 days, they turn into a beetle. They emerge like the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, same concept. So when the beetle first emerges, it'll be white, like the pupa is white. And then as the shell hardens, it gets darker and darker, goes through brown shades. And then it's black in about four days or so. And the shell is hard and that's when you can move it. So it lays eggs in the wheat bran. And you can put pieces of cardboard in there, egg crates or toilet paper, cardboard, paper towel, cardboard, anything like that for them just to hide in and they lay their eggs on it. And they eat and get their moisture from like banana peels or carrots or a piece of potato. Else? Celery, they like cantaloupe rinds. Pretty much anything that you're fixing to get rid of. They're like pigs in miniature form. And you just put them in there and they like the dark and they like it warm, say 70 to 85 degrees. And. And they just multiply, and about every two weeks or so, you just move the beetles to the next bin, and you start over. And the first bin has all the eggs and the babies in it, which of course are microscopic, you can't see them unless you know what you're looking for. But they look like little specks, and you just wait. And What I would do is every few days, because I'm really impatient is every few days I would just drag my fingers through it. And then you put your head down and you look at it really closely and you wait to see if you can see the wheat brand moving around on the top. Once you can start seeing that movement, that's when you start feeding them, the carrots or the potatoes or whatever. And then you just let them grow. And meanwhile, every two weeks, you're moving the beetle around. So by the time the first ones are full size, which takes, 60 days or so, the beetles have been moved, eight times maybe. And now you've got eight bins and, and a beetle lays, I can't really remember the number off the top of my head, but it's like 20, 000 eggs in her lifetime or something. Something ridiculous. Yeah. It's this stupid number. And so before you know it, by the time you have your first set of full size mealworms, you've got a hundred thousand mealworms.
Carey: 6:04
I decided that I was going to start that. Because, like everybody they're good animals and I ordered, I think it was like two or 3, 000 mealworms off of eBay or Amazon, one or the other. And, I did that. I put them in a bin and I even got one of those reptile heater pads and put underneath it. So they would stay warm and cozy. And I let them go for weeks and weeks, and nothing ever happened. I'm like, I'm doing something wrong. I ask you about it, and you're just like, no, it'll come. And so I just kept going, and I had the wheat middling in there. And occasionally I would put some chick starter in there. It has to be the real fine stuff, but it's really high in protein. And then I went away for a couple of weeks and I come home and I've got black beetles at the top of all four bins. And I'm like, no, three weeks ago, I separated y'all. How did this happen? But apparently they were all at different stages of their replication. I have a ridiculous amount of them. So this weekend I'm planning on sorting them all again, and I'm gonna put all the black beetles in a bigger container by themselves and let that process start all over and, sift through the rest of them and see where it goes. But it's, for me, When you compare it to other animals to farm, if you will, it's very cheap to get started with the mealworms. People are selling them, like a thousand for 15 bucks, free shipping, something crazy like that. And now the sifters and stuff, that was expensive, not. Really expensive. Like how much does a new set of those costs? Like for the ones for the five gallon pails, like a hundred, hundred and fifty bucks.
Jennifer: 8:14
Yeah. Yeah. And that
Carey: 8:15
was,
Jennifer: 8:16
yeah.
Carey: 8:17
Yeah. And that's a complete set. That's not bad.
Jennifer: 8:20
No they're, when you go looking for them, they're not mealworm sifters, they're called gold mining sifters and they'll have different grades of them, but you want all of them. So you but now to get started just for the newbie. You don't need sifters. You can do all of this by hand Until you figure it out and then once you get Going and you decide it's for you What I did was went to the dollar tree and got different size colanders And then I quickly outgrew that and then I bought the sifters. But now let's talk about the tubs for just a second. Now when you get super, super serious, there's specialty type tubs for it. All I did was You know those rubber made drawer systems and it's the plastic frame and the plastic drawers And everybody I
Carey: 9:11
got one that I came across the other day is three drawers high and My wife said she wasn't going to use it anymore. And I said, I'll take it. She looked at me and said, what are you going to do? That said nothing.
Jennifer: 9:25
So
Carey: 9:26
when I sift through them, that's what they're moving into.
Jennifer: 9:29
So the, those are great for the mealworms. Now the darkling beetles. Do you know the rolling carts that have like the 10, two or three inch drawers in it? That's perfect for the beetles. They can't fly. They can't get out of it. That's all the space they need. You just have a drawer system of beetles because it becomes an issue and you don't want to, those Rubbermaid drawers are like 10 inches, right? Or eight inches. So those are good for the mealworms cause they like to dig down in there and eat stuff. But the darkling beetles, they just need, like a half an inch of substrate and then put the beetles in there and they can't get out.
Carey: 10:17
That is a lot of beetles to take up eight trays of those.
Jennifer: 10:23
But you're only going to put 50 or 60 in each one. But then you got to label them and like how old they are. Cause they only live like three to four months. If they're happy and so you got to keep a constant rotation of pupa going into the darkling beetles and, but then you don't want the mealworms to pupate too early. Once you find your rhythm, you learn your environment and figure out how quickly they're doing stuff. But those plastic drawers, you can write on them with permanent marker Or dry erase board marker, and then wipe it off later. The dates, you'll want to write your dates and stuff on there, so you know how old those bins are.
Carey: 11:05
I'd have to do it with a permanent marker, and then use something like Bright Fluid to wipe it off.
Jennifer: 11:11
Nah, just exit out, and then just right below it.
Carey: 11:14
That works too.
Jennifer: 11:15
Yeah so we jumped around there. So the darkling beetle lays an egg, becomes the mealworm, goes into the pupa, and goes back into the beetle. So the concept here is you're just moving the beetles to a fresh one, a fresh bin of substrate, which in this case is wheat bran, and allowing them to lay more eggs. And so the first bin has enough eggs in it to become the mealworms. So if you're using one of those Rubbermaid drawers and you have five beetles, then you can leave them in there longer. But when you're running hundreds of beetles, that's, let's say a hundred beetles. That's 200, 000 eggs. So you may only want to leave them in there for a week. Do you see where I'm saying about how often to move?
Carey: 12:08
That could get ridiculous really quick.
Jennifer: 12:11
Exactly. But that's the concept behind it. How many. beetles you have determines how quickly you're going to move them. If you're just going to keep a few worms for yourself, you could theoretically leave them in one tub forever and just let them to do their own thing, and then just reach in there and get the worms out that you want. Now the darkling beetles don't fly. The mealworms don't bite. The pupa don't even have a mouth or eyes or anything. They just wiggle around. There's no real drawback to them. They're great for fishing. Bait stores will buy them. Ducks love them. They're good protein. I think they're like 45 percent protein. They're pretty high in protein. Let's see what else.
Carey: 12:53
I
Jennifer: 12:56
have never, I never even got into that. So I think you have to, I think you have to freeze them and then you freeze dry them because you have to kill them somehow before you put them in the freeze dryer. But I never did get into any of that. If you just want to store them and not get them to pupate say you have enough beetles and you don't want more, then you just put them in a container and put them in the bottom of your refrigerator, just like where you would keep your fishing bait. And that, that coolness. We'll hibernate them essentially.
Carey: 13:30
Just save them for later.
Jennifer: 13:31
Exactly. They, and then you just bring them out like once a week or so. Warm them up, feed them, put them back in there.
Carey: 13:37
That's crazy to me. I know. It's
Jennifer: 13:40
really silly, really. I mean I grew them in those tubs that I found for free on the corner or on marketplace or whatever and Back when I had that farm Wheat bran was fourteen dollars a fifty. Oh, there's some more information. Don't forget to bake your substrate
Carey: 13:58
Can I ask you about that?
Jennifer: 14:01
Wheat bran will have mites in it when you bring it home from the feed store. So you need to, first of all, keep it outside. Don't bring it in your house. And second of all, you can freeze it in a deep freeze, but that takes a few weeks to kill everything. Or you microwave it, or you can just put it in the oven and cook it on low, like 200, 250 for an hour or so. And then that will kill the mites. and then just store it in Ziploc bags. So just keep that in mind. That was really the only hard part about the whole thing. But then you've got frass, which is great for your garden. Frass is just the manure from the mealworms. You put it in your garden.
Carey: 14:43
Yeah, the first time I sifted through, the FRAs is what comes out of the finest screen. Down in the very bottom of the bucket. And I was like, what is this Because it looked a lot like the wheat middling same color, which, makes sense. That's what they've been eating. But it was just very powdery.
Jennifer: 15:05
Yeah. It's like a sand consistency.
Carey: 15:08
And, I put it, so I'm fixing to start some tomatoes and peppers and some really hot peppers and stuff like that. So the the broiler chickens, the Cornish that I had brooding in peat moss, I got, cleaned out the brooders. And I've had it sitting in a wheelbarrow outside and it gets turned around every few days, but I'm going to take, I also mixed in the frass from my worms. I put that in there. And I'm going to mix that with some soil, just regular dirt. And I feel like I'm going to have pretty nutritious base for my plants. So peat moss that's had chicks in it for a couple of weeks, some worm frass, and then I'll feed some of the worms to my chickens and start the process all over.
Jennifer: 16:09
Yeah you'll have hundreds of thousands of worms before you realize it. So
Carey: 16:14
it
Jennifer: 16:18
is, but it's not. I used, because I sold them on eBay. Cause this is before my website and I would you count them every so often because your size worms are going to be different than somebody else's. And so I would count out every so often how many, how much I would put 500 in a bowl. And then I would weigh it and I want to say, I still have it written out there. I want to say 500 worms was a thousand grams or something. It's written on my wall in my incubator room. And I can't remember now, but anyway, so I would just, the rule of thumb, when you order worms from somebody is you add, 10 percent just to make the customer happy. And so they ordered a thousand worms say, then I would figure out how much that weighed and send them that, and then add, a handful more in there or something, but they you have so many of them that you can do that. And so many people buy them for so many different reasons. And now, they're trying to push this insect protein powder. People are starting to eat them. So it's not just for chickens, everything. My biggest buyers, believe it or not, were monkey people.
Carey: 17:37
You lost me with people eating them.
Jennifer: 17:41
I'm not eating them. They're clean and I see what they eat and I can understand it, but, and maybe they taste good. They're supposed to taste a little nutty almost, but I have not ever tried one.
Carey: 17:55
Okay.
Jennifer: 17:56
Yeah, but my, my, my standard buyers were people who had monkeys. So think outside of the box with the poultry people. Yeah,
Carey: 18:09
I'm gonna, I'm gonna get into that. In your spare
Jennifer: 18:11
time?
Carey: 18:12
Yeah, in all my spare time. Yeah. Anything else that you can add about your experience as a worm farmer?
Jennifer: 18:20
I will tell you a little known fact about me is I like opera music and I would blast opera while I was sorting the worms and they were more active with the opera music than without.
Carey: 18:34
And that brings up another topic that I have, I'm curious at the amount of research because I have been researching poultry more and did not realize even lighting people have broke that down to a science. And I'm curious if there's, or what studies there are out there that talk about different types of music and how it affects animals. That's a rabbit hole I'm going to go down and see what I can come up with.
Jennifer: 19:09
When I am in the incubator room messing with the chicks, I do blast 70s rock. I will. You that the chicks are really active and loud. So I'm not sure if they're opposing the music or just singing at the top of their lungs. Like I am.
Carey: 19:28
So are we talking like hairband music?
Jennifer: 19:31
Yes.
Carey: 19:35
Like white snake, deaf leopard, Aerosmith, those people.
Jennifer: 19:39
That's eighties. But yeah.
Carey: 19:41
It is eighties. That's about the best I've got. I grew up on that. All right, cool deal. Thank you for joining us this week. Before you go, be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they are released. And they're released every week. Feel free to email us at poultrynerds at gmail. com to share your thoughts about the show. Until next time, poultry pals, keep clucking, keep learning, and keep it egg citing. This is Carey signing off from Poultry Nerds. Feathers up, everyone.
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