Saturday, December 21, 2013

Mealworms (Discontinued)

(Discontinued)

Mealworms

Not well known is that Mealworms and beetles, need an EASY source of water. People say "they get all the water they need from the air" or "they get all the water they need from fruits/vegetables", HOWEVER, if they have to choose to chew up on a soft water filled pupa or a hard carrot or sugary fruit, their going to go for the pupae. My theory is that if I supply EASY to consume water at all times to them, they MAY not mess with the pupae. I also believe supplying them with bugs like crickets, in addition to water, and perhaps the pupae destruction would be minimal. The #1 biggest problem I see with mealworm raising, is that the pupae are all killed, unless they are removed and since there seems to be no automated way of sorting pupae, it must be done manually, and since they can turn into pupae within 1 hour of the last time you checked, you would have to dedicate your life to picking out pupae, if you want to go large scale. I'm searching for a better solution.

Favorite foods:
#1 CRICKETS! (freeze-dried)
Seems to like meat a LOT

Like:
Sliced corned beef, sliced ham. (cooked of course)
Carrots, celery
papaya [completely ripe] (dark orange)

Will eat:
oats, wheat bran, oat bran
chicken & turkey (cooked of course)
bread
potato (molds badly)
?Flies?
?Catfood? (i hear they will)


Will NOT eat:
Carpenter ants
Peanut butter
Apricot preserves
?Dogfood? (i tried 1 specific brand and they run away from it).

I'm working on solving the labor intensive work of sorting pupae from mealworms.
This is my beta prototype, not yet created (i borrowed all the images and photoshopped them together)





Please contribute to my list!
I am curious if they will eat roaches.
Click Post A Comment below this sentence and type in what you know.