Small Factor Mealworm Farm

So i wanted to make a mealworm farm that would fit in my apartment i Copenhagen. I drew inspiration from this instructable: Velacreation mealworm farm. I just built this yesterday so I do not currently know how effective this farm will be. I will make an update once the whole thing is running smoothly.

Things you'll need:

• Some sort of rack based unit with boxes. I used Ikea Trofast which has 6 racks
• Insect net
• Mealworms

tools:

• Bread knife or similar to cut hole in bottom of boxes
• Hot glue gun

Put on some music an get assembling according to the instructions.

I cut a hole in two of the boxes and glued the insect netting on the outside of the boxes.

The first box with the net will be where the beetles and pupae go in. The beetles will then lay eggs in the bottom which will drop down to the box below.

The second one with the whole will be used in the second to last rack. here the adult larva will be filtered from their food source and this is hopefully where you'll harvest the mealworm.

I started out with about 300 grams of live worms, added oats and carrots and just let them do their thing.

So the idea is that once my first batch of worms have all turned in to pupae, I will move them to the top box. here they will be placed on a plastic container out of reach of the beetles

The cycle/flow will look like this from top to bottom:

• Beetles lay eggs, eggs drop down
• eggs hatch (one week in second box)
• small larva (one week in third box)
• medium larva (one week in fourth box)
• large larva (three days in last box) take out pupa and eat the rest.
• some larva will pupate add to first box

The bottom container should contain droppings which can be used as fertilizer.

This is how I plan to manage the farm update will follow when I'll have run through the cycle and have mealworms for consumption.