starting a mealworm colony

[wvherper]

I need to start a mealworm colony for my lep gecko but...i dont know anything about em.Ihave a 2.5 gallon hexagonal(sp) aquarium to breed em in but i need to know the food and how much to start with and a basic timeline of how long it will take until i get beetles and all that other stuff.THANX in advance

[daniel1983]

I would suggest getting several containers to sort out the bugs at the different stages. I am pretty sure there are a few threads here concerning mealworm colonies...give the search function a shot and see what you get

http://www.ball-pythons.net/forums/search.php?

[Jay_Bunny]

Seperating the stages is definatly a good idea. The worms and beetles will chew on the pupa if you leave them in the same container. Here are the time frames for each stage

Egg: 3-4 weeks
Worm: 8-10 weeks
Pupa: 1-3 weeks (in my experience 1-2 weeks)
Adult: 3-4 weeks

So when you purchase some mealworms from the store, they will probably already be a few weeks old. I started getting pupa about a month or so after getting the worms. I started out with 100 worms and I now have 8 beetles and several pupae. I'll be checking today for more pupa.

As for food, I feed mine a mixture of things. Uncooked oatmeal (the kind for the cylinder container), bran flakes, corn flakes, cherrios, Nutro dry cat food, potatoes, lettuce, strawberries, cucumber, ect.

After a few weeks you'll notice that the bottom of your worm container will gather a dust like substance. This is poop and needs to be dumped. If you are dumping food and poo from an adult container, its best to dump it into another container as it might contain eggs and baby worms.

Its takes a few months to get a colony started, but mine is on its way to producing me worms.