Week 4: The breeding method of mealworms

1. So firstly, our group bought a plastic container with small openings at the top to ensure there’s air flowing into the container. The container was not that big, just big enough to keep all the worms inside and preventing them from escaping.

2. The container was then filled with sand to provide an environment similar to the natural habitat of meal worms. The amount of sand was filled just enough to provide a thin layer for the meal worms to move about.

3. After all these were done, we then placed our meal worms inside the plastic container provided. An amount of about roughly 50 meal worms was breed in the container.

4. Every day, we will feed the meal worms with moist bread. The moist bread would serve as a source of food and water, since we cannot put a bowl of water in as the worms will drown when they crawl in for water consumption.

5. We also included some newspaper to provide some shade for the meal worms. Surprisingly, the meal worms ate up some of the newspaper as holes were being observed on the newspapers.

6. The temperature of the surroundings was at room temperature, about 25°C. The humidity was about 70-90% [1], the humidity in Malaysia. The humidity affects the rate of reproduction of the full grown beetles. The higher the humidity, the quicker the rate of reproduction [2].

7. Finally, the condition inside the container was maintained by removing any dead meal worms. So far, from the start of the project till the current time, there wasn't any dead meal worm found yet.

The current status of our meal worms can be seen in Figure 1 below, and we will continue to observe the lives of meal worms and we hope to obtain some inspiration from them.

Figure 1: The current conditions of the meal worms bred.

The video below shows how to breed meal worms in few simple steps. Feel free to watch it and to get a clearer and better understanding in breeding meal worms.

A guide to raising and breeding meal worms

[1] McGinley, M. (2011). Climate of Malaysia. Retrieved from http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/151260

[2] Mealwormcare.org. (2014). Raising and breeding. Retrieved from http://mealwormcare.org/breeding/