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My chickens favorite treat in the world are meal worms. Even though they were kinda pricey, I was buying them anyway because they loved them so. Then I came across an article that said it is illegal to feed chickens meal worms in the UK.
This did not make sense to me since meal worms are supposed to be very healthy and even good for humans to eat. Yuck!
I started looking into the reason and found it is because most worms come from China.
In China they feed the worms hormones so the worms will be big and make the most profit. If you go online to find worms to buy you will find a lot of “Super Worms”.
A super worm is made with hormones to make them huge. This is not heathy for the chickens and not healthy for the eggs. I immediately pulled out my bag of worms and it said right on it “made in China”.
The next time I went to the store I looked at all four brands that was there and all were from China.
Researching again I found you can raise your own. I found some online and bought a lot of 2000 that were organically raised.
You can buy meal worm bedding but it is just wheat germ flakes.
I bought some wheat germ and rolled oats at Sprouts for the bedding. They were both organic and pretty cheap.
There is a lot of tutorials on YouTube.
You just put the worms in a tub with the bedding. You do not give them water, only a carrot or some other piece of fruit or vegetable. I have found that broccoli is the best choice. They get all the moisture they need from that, but make sure it is not something juicy or the oats will mold.
After a month or so you will start seeing pupae in the tub. This is their next stage of life. You can keep them all in the same tub or remove the pupae and put them into their own tub.
I chose to put them in another tub but you don’t have to. If you wait another three to four weeks they will hatch into a darkling beetle.
The Beatles are really light when they hatch but get darker until they turn almost black.
Each female beatle will lay between 250 and 500 eggs over the next two months.
The kind of work and space it takes is not for everyone but can be fun at the same time.
In the picture above you can see I put a smaller tub inside of the larger tub. I put a screen on the bottom of the smaller tub. I put the pupae and the beetles in that one and as they lay eggs they fall down into the bottom tub and then you will have a whole new generation of baby worms. I drilled holes in the tub sides and lids for air. The beetles are not able to climb the plastic walls and they cannot fly, so it works out really nice.
