Lots of mealworm work!

I spent the whole morning working on my mealworms.

I had noticed that the bedding in my drawer of larger worms was just powder and not the flaky wheat bran any more.  I was afraid that a lot of it was their droppings and not anything nutritious, so I decided to sift the worms out and give them new bedding.  I used a large metal kitchen sieve, and the powder went through well, and just the tiniest of worms.  I spent a lot of time picking out the tiny worms that had fallen through.  I just hate to waste them.  I had to use my long bird-feeding tweezers to pick them out.  If I had a garden, the powder would probably make good fertilizer!  After I got the worms separated, I took their picture and then put them in fresh bedding.  I also found a handful of new pupae and separated them.

I sifted my beetles again and gave them new bedding.  I used another plastic container for them, but I've got to figure out what to use for this fourth drawer.  I took their picture, too.

I guess the only way to keep the worms a uniform size is to sift the beetles more often, but that will take a lot of containers.

The Life Cycle Continues

I sifted a small batch of mealworms a few days ago and had them in a separate container to use them for my birds.  Today, I found my first pupa from my very own mealworms!  Is this my grandchild?

I also poked through my beetle bin and picked out a couple dozen dead beetles and beetle parts.  I've seen a few stray wings in the bin, but don't think I've seen any beetles before that I could tell were dead.  Most of these are several months old.  I replaced the newspaper layer, which was full of holes and had been there since November.  While I had the newspaper off, all the live beetles dug down under the bedding, and those that didn't move were possible dead ones.  I stirred it a little with my finger to look for any more dead beetles.  I put the ones I thought might be dead into a dish so I could see if they moved or not.  Sometimes the live ones will hold still a few seconds and then start wiggling  

I really need to sift the eggs out again, but I'm not sure where to put them.  I guess I need another bin!

I have two drawers with mealworms in them now.  Some in the older drawer are getting pretty big, and I'm expecting more pupae soon.  The other drawer has tiny ones.  I still haven't gotten the sifting method figured out.  When I sift, I still get a wide variety of sizes.  Maybe I need to sift more often into more drawers, but that will get complicated.

Harvesting

Well, this is what I'm raising the worms for, but I had my first experience of having to collect and drown my OWN worms to feed them to baby birds.  It was REALLY hard!  I put some apple slices in with the worms I'm posting a picture of how happy the worms are when drinking off the apples.  You can tell they like apple better than sweet potato!  Then, I shook the apple over a bowl to knock off the worms.  Since I have a variety of sizes of worms, I picked out the tiny ones to put back to grow some more.  I need to figure out a better way to harvest them.

Worms that are fed to baby birds have to be killed, since they can eat through the tissue in a tiny bird's esophagus.  I put them in hot water and they wiggle for a few seconds and die.  I've done this lots of times to worms that we bought, but not to ones that I raised from eggs.  It took a while for me to gather the courage to do this.  I'm feeding five baby Carolina wrens.

My sons told me that they don't want me to turn into a worm rehabber!