meal worm breeding

[Neo]

i'm breeding meal worms and i have a few specific questions. like is there a sign that mealies are getting ready to turn into "cocoons"? will the kinda stop moving alot or turn dark? Mine are starting to just lay there. Still alive and brightly colored. Also about how long will a mealie stay in a cocoon.

also i noticed that the "giant mealies" i buy dont shed.. is that normal?

[nomes]

i'm learning but each shed they go dormant,if they go black they are dead,move your intermediate cocoons(which don't look like worms) out the worms will chomp them, use your basebord or hot water tank as heater speeds up the proccess i use coffee cans once beetles hatch then shift them every few weeks add beetles as hatching but i like to seperate the stages works for me but check out latin name for info many ways of doing it but none movement is part of the proccess

[Neo]

oh thanks. also my dad raised silk worms as a child and he said if i bothered the mealies as they were preparing to morph they would die. is that true?

[Linds]

When they are beginning to pupate in to the alien-like pupae, they will sort of become chubby and inactive. If you handle them it won't affect them in any negative ways. Mealies don't have coccoons, they turn in to beetles, not moths They go from worm -> pupae (aliens, or as my sister got me in the habit of calling them, fetuses ) -> beetles. The amount of time they sepdn in each depends on the temperature they are kept at. They will take longer at cooler temps. It all depends whether you want to do the seperation and rotation of all the stages. I used to keep them all in one big container and never had any problems, but in the past few months production seemed to almost stop, so I began seperating them and the colonies were booming again. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

[Neo]

yeah i just didnt know what to call the pupae and i didnt know if u ppl would respond to aliens as me and my friend call them too. i'm a lil confused by what you meant by rotation of stages and stuff.

[Linds]

I keep all my mealies in one container, aliens in another, and beetles in another. I rotate the beetles between a few containers. With my supers I don't as large of a rotation, I only rotate the beetles back and forth between the two containers. When the super worms are large enough to pick out, I put them in the container the beetles were living and laying in, and switch the beetles to the other container. The mealie (darkling) beetles are rotated between 3 containers (more when I have the space). Hope that made some sense

[Neo]

so theres always a container of JUST mealies and JUST aliens but several containers for beetles (for variety in breeding i assume)? or do u mix the beetles w/ mealies and aliens

oh and thx for the replies

[Linds]

I just juggle the mealies and beetles between the same 3 containers, trying to keep the mealies and beetles as seperate as possible. I think my mealies began munching on the beetles. I have a tiny little deli cup where I keep all the aliens and check every so often to transfer out any beetles to the colony. It used to work fine for me to keep them all in one big container, but for some reason theye ventually all started eating eachother , so I keep them as seperate as I can manage

[Neo]

o alright that makes sense. thx

[Neo]

thought i'd give an update (haha if neone cares). i have 12 (probably 15 by next morning) aliens now (of the bigger species of mealies... my small ones arent morphing for some reason.. ohwell, atleast my 8$ on the big ones was worth it.. get about 3 aliens a day now). they sure squirm a lot when i move them into new containers. and i actually got to watch one mealie turn into an alien. it just looks like a normal shed.. except a lot more violent jolts... and a physical change... i put the containers inside my leopard gecko cages i'm cheap and dont wanna buy more heat sources. my blizz likes to have staring contests w/ the aliens.. (oh and sorry bout all these parenthesis..)

[reptile boi]

when a mealie is about to pupate it kinda curls up into a "C" position and has a different texture than the ones that are not about to pupate.



Thanks,
Ben