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To breed mealworms, all you need are a few basic supplies. You can use a small fish tank, a plastic tupperware, or any other clear holding container to house your mealworm breeding environment. When selecting a container for breeding mealworms in, make sure you choose one that is large enough to hold several hundred mealworms, but small enough to minimize unused space. Your mealworm breeding container will also need a vented lid that will hold in moisture while allowing air exchange. If you use a tupperware container, simply cut a little square in the top about 3" x 3" and glue a piece of screen over the hole. If you are using a fish tank, you can place a piece of screen over the tank and cover half of the sides with plastic.
On the bottom of your mealworm breeding container, you should have a few inches of good substrate. The substrate will be the primary food your mealworms will digest for nutrients and you will have to clean the substrate from time to time. Some good examples of mealworm substrates are oatmeal, cornmeal, and whole wheat flour. Before you add mealworms to your container, make sure you have a few inches of proper substrate on the bottom of your container.
Once you lay your substrate down, place a small square of paper in the middle of your mealworm breeding container. You can place some sliced potato wedges on top of the paper. This will add some moisture to your mealworm breeding container and the mealworms will feed on the potato as well as the substrate. Make sure you change the potato wedges often as they can develop mold, which you want to avoid introducing into your mealworm breeding container.
If the environment seems to dry, and the potato wedges dry out quickly, you can add a damp sponge or a wet paper towel into the container. This will help by providing a little extra moisture. But be aware that you do not want your mealworms breeding container to be too moist as this will encourage mold which you want to avoid.
Now that you have your mealworm breeding container set up, you can put your mealworms in. Keep your mealworm setup in a warm room between 70 to 85°F. You do not want to sit your container in direct sunlight but a little indirect sunlight will do well. There's not much you have to do after this point besides keep an eye on the potato wedges and moisture levels. Changing the substrate every now and then will also encourage cleanliness and healthy mealworm development.
Within a few weeks, you should notice some of the mealworms turning into beetles. The mealworms do not lay eggs, but turn into beetles when they mature. These beetles will then produce offspring which will be in the form of mealworms.
Many mealworm breeders just leave the beetles and mealworms in the same container the whole time. But more professional mealworm breeders separate the beetles from the mealworms. Once the beetles produce more mealworms, the mealworms are placed in a separate tank.
This process of breeding mealworms can go on indefinitely. Once you successfully breed your first batch of mealworms the process becomes easy and you can literally breed hundreds of thousands of mealworms in a very short period of time. The only question you will have left to answer is, what to do with all these mealworms.
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