Farming Mealworms. How to....
The first and most important thing about farming mealworms and really the only thing that will either make your farm easy to manage and low maintenance or turn your mealworm farm into a labor intensive nightmare that never ends is "ROTATION". Rotation, rotation, rotation is key and let me tell you why. Once you get your worms it becomes a waiting game. When they are full grown they will begin to morph into pupa. From there they will change into darkling beetles. Start to separate out your pupa into a new bins one you start to see them appear. You will notice by time you pick threw a container and gotten all the pupa their will be more pupa that have already appeared. Usually within a few day period you will notice lots of pupa in your containers. If you see beetles then you should also pick them out and add them to the new bin. This tedious task of picking threw the bin is what will happen to every bin if you don't stay on top of your rotation. If you get mixed bins with worms, beetles and pupa all together they would will have no choice but to hand separate or do what I do. Toss that bin to the chickens and move on to the next depending on how large your setup is. If you stay on top of rotation and do it weekly you will not have to hand pick threw your bins.
Once you have your bin of beetles separated to only beetles or pupa now you are farming. From this point I sift once a week. Take all your beetles and add them to a new bin with substrate and feed. The substrate is what you use for bedding but also the food source for the worms when they hatch. I prefer wheat bran but I have tried corn meal and oats before. The fresh feed is for moisture. We use potatoes, carrots, apples, celery, etc. Once you have sifted your new beetles in their new bins and added your substrate and feed stock for water you are done for another week. The reason to do it weekly is the eggs being laid will not be hatched yet and will pass threw the screen and into the substrate. This substrate should be added back to the bin it was sifted from and giving a small amount of water feed stock so when the baby worms start to hatch they have everything they need. This allows you to have all the worms in the same bin be within a week or so of each other and mostly the same size so when your sorting for sale or to feed your livestock.
Beetles
Pupa
It will start out very slow and even after sifting the beetles out it will still take 8 to 10 weeks depending on temp for them to start to pupate for your next beetles but if you stay on the plan and sift weekly every week after you will get the same amount again and again. Always set a bin to the side for expanding beetle population even if you are at the max production you are looking for so when they start to die off you can have fresh ones ready to replace them and not interrupt your breeding cycle. The will average between one and three months as beetles.
Now lets go over the very small list of supplies needed for you to get your mealworm farm going. First will be shelving. Shelving is going to be your biggest purchase for your mealworm farm. Some people will already have extra shelves or make them with cinderblocks and boards. I use the large adjustable shelves so I can add or take away shelves where needed and also so if I decide to change my containers later on down the road to something else I can adjust my shelves to fit the maximum amount of containers. These are the style shelves I use in my 45 ft shipping container dedicated to my composting worms and mealworms. I will get into the setup of my shipping container later on.
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Next item is containers. You can use almost any type of container since neither mealworms or darkling beetles climb or fly. Some people use larger bins for larger operations and some people use small plastic shoe box style bins from Walmart. These concrete mixing tubs from home depot seem to be a favorite for their cheap price. I keep around 10k mealworms in one of these size bins.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Medium-Mixing-Tub-26100/301943161
Next item up is your sifter set. Some people use a kitchen plastic colander and if that works for you the that is great but my problem with that is it will not separate out your frass from your substrate and is really only good for separating out your beetles. We will get into "FRASS" in another article later on but the short story is it is fantastic for your gardens very similar to earth worm castings. The sifter set I recommend is a 5 gal bucket sifter set and you can buy the full set or just the sizes you need. The 1/8th size is fine for sifting beetles and the 1/30th is perfect for sifting your finished frass from the left over substrate. This also allows you to get maximum usage from your substrate to where as with a colander you will be tossing a good 25% of it in the trash.
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Last thing to get is some 5 gal buckets for your sifter set. No big deal here just run down to your local bakery or restaurant and ask if they have any food grade buckets you can have. Most of them will have mayo or pickle buckets laying around that get tossed in the trash.
With the sifter set above I can sift a mixing bin like listed above in about 3 minutes. This means I can do 10 bins a week at around 30 minutes producing 100k mealworms in that time. I like to allow for a hour of time since you will spend an extra few minutes feeding the rotating the bins also but that is a very small amount of time for the production received. What is your reason for wanting to farm mealworms?
For reasons to farm mealworms check out this article I wrote.
https://steemit.com/mealworms/@liberyworms/why-farm-mealworms
For extra help with mealworm farming check out my mealworm farming group on Facebook.