Random Blatherings

And I’m scarily creepily excited about that. I now have 18 altogether. Soon, they’ll grow into adult Tenebrio molitor AKA Darkling Beetle. This raising mealworms lark is surprisingly rewarding. Seeing the whole life cycle of a mealworm will be really cool.

One thing I have noticed, is that they’re picky about their substrate (the material they live in). Weetabix seem to be acceptable, oat bran seems to be unpleasant for some reason, and wheat bran seems to be their favourite. I’m not entirely sure what it was that they arrived in, but it looked pretty similar to wheat bran. They needed a top up after a couple of days, so I crumbled some Weetabix up for them, which they seemed to like. I added a large amount of oat bran into the mix yesterday, but I’ve checked this morning, and most of the larvae are round the edge of the bowl, whereas most of the oat bran is in the middle. I have a “test bowl” that has some wheat bran in it (it’s old bokashi bran, which is why it’s in a test bowl - I want to make sure the “helpful bacteria” don’t affect the worms), and when I added some worms to that, they all burrowed straight in. They never seem to come to the surface. So, it seems that wheat bran is the preferred substrate.