How do you breed mealworms? I was thinking of dried ones.
Dried ones are rubbish. But I would strongly advise against breeding these critters. It simply takes forever and involves more work than the little chickens themselves. But I'll explain it anyway. So you buy about 3 kg of live mealworms. You then distribute them in containers of 1 kg each and add about 2 kg of wheat bran and oatmeal and hard bread. Twice a week you give them something fresh, like carrot, lettuce, apple. What is not eaten in one day from the fresh stuff, you must remove again. Under no circumstances should mold get into the box, then you can throw everything away. And then you wait. Depending on how big your purchased mealworms already were, you wait several weeks. When they are fully grown, they pupate. Here you have to take them out of the box with the mealworms and put them into a separate box. The pupae need nothing to eat. After about 10-14 days the pupae turn into beetles, which you then have to put in another box and feed like the mealworms. The box with the beetles should have small holes at the bottom so that the very small freshly hatched baby mealworms can hatch through. Until they are big enough to be fed, it takes about 3-4 months.
However, they only reproduce at temperatures above 20 degrees, better 25 degrees. So also put a heating mat underneath. And you must separate the critters at every stage because the mealworms eat the pupae and the beetles eat their eggs and babies. Oh, and at least twice a week you have to sift all the crap (poop) out and it creates a huge cloud of dust. So better buy them live as you need them and just keep your hands off breeding.
