Mealworms - nutritious and free treats for chickens
Like 3 Dislike 0 Published on 1 Jun 2017
If you want to give your chickens a bit of a treat, why not choose something that they’ll think is really super scrumptious and that will be good for them too - mealworms.
Rather than buying mealworms to feed to your chickens, why not set up your own mealworm colony, and have an endless supply of free (or almost free) chicken treats? It only takes a box or two, something for the mealworms to eat, and a bit of knowhow.
Mealworms are the larval stage of the darkling beetle Tenebrio molitor.
To grow your own mealworm colony, you need a few mealworms to start off with.
You need a box to keep them in. Plastic is convenient and clean and they can’t climb out. Something wider than it is deep. Not too small. Not air-tight – it needs some ventilation. The mealworms and later on the adults don’t walk or fly out of a plastic box, but ideally you want to keep other insects out.
What they eat is almost anything that’s not soggy. Oatmeal, wheat bran, any kind of cereal. It can be useful to give them something with quite small particles so that you can easily separate out the mealworms from the food. What I often do is sieve some fine dusty powder out of the chook food pellets and use that as mealworm food.
Put an inch or two of food in the bottom of the container, then you just put the mealworms straight into their food source and they live in it.
As well as they dry food, they need something juicy as a source of moisture, so occasionally give them a piece of potato or the end of a carrot, a bit of celery, or a piece of pumpkin peel, something like that. Try to avoid anything that will go mouldy though. If it starts to go mouldy or rotten, remove it. A small cauliflower leaf is good because they can hide under it. They prefer it dark so give them something to hide under, and if your container is translucent, keep the whole box covered up most of the time.
Keep it warm. The ideal temperature is about 25 degrees Celcius – like a lovely summer’s day, but you don’t need to be fussy about it. But the warmer it is, they faster they will grow and multiply. So keep them warm enough to keep them eating and growing.
As they grow, they shed their skin, just like caterpillars. Their new skin is pale just after they have shed their old skin, and then they darken to the usual caramel brown colour.
After a few weeks or a couple of months, depending on the temperature and how old your mealworms were to start with, you’ll start to see some of the larvae will begin to change into pupa. They come up to the surface, curl into a C shape, and then just change. This is the mealworm equivalent of a caterpillar’s chrysalis except they don’t hide away in a cocoon, they just transform themselves from larva to pupa. They spend two or three weeks like this, not moving much, concentrating on turning into an adult.
And then the pupa turns into a beetle, again without much in the way of an outer case, just slowly changing shape. At first the new beetles are pale with orange heads. They go darker brown and finally nearly black over a few days as they mature.
The adult beetles mate and lay tiny eggs, smaller than a pinhead. You can sieve out the adults from the eggs and let the eggs mature and hatch separately if you want to grow up that generation while the adults go on laying eggs. Or you can just leave them all together – as long as the adults have plenty of food, they seem not to eat the eggs.
Chickens love the mealworm larvae and the pupae and the adult beetles too, and they are all good for them, with vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, and lots of protein – comparable to beef.
Mealworms are completely edible by humans too and are traditional food in several countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. They can be included in stir fries, ground into tortillas to enrich their protein, or deep fried to make a crunchy snack.
In 2015 it was discovered that mealworms can actually eat polystyrene and turn it into usable food. We throw away tonnes of Polystyrene and it takes decades to degrade in landfills, but these little larvae can eat it up and turn it into soil.
So these little beetles might have an important role in cleaning up our world and feeding its people, but in the meantime, I’m just thinking of them as chicken feed.
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