If you reply to a specific question, please reference by number.



(1) Current mealworm substrate/food, from bottom to top: oats, honey nut cheerios (stolen from xelda), dry rice baby food, fish food. Carrots for moisture. Any ideas for improving this mix? Things I could add, for example.



(2) I really hate picking through the container, digging out dead worms, aliens, and such. Does anyone have any tricks or tips for more efficiently taking care of this? Work is quite busy, with current deployments and all, and that means less time to do the same stuff.



(3) Putting my worms in the fridge slows down their movements, but doesn't seem to slow down the rate they turn into aliens. Am I mistaken in thinking it should?



(4) The alien and beetles have their own container. Similar substrate/food as the mealworms, but I use bisquick (baking product) instead of baby cereal, since they have similar nutritional content..I use it with the beetles since I figure it's less wasteful than using the baby cereal on them. I also use carrots for moisture. All this seems to work a lot less successfully than with the mealworms. Any ideas on how to improve the quality of the beetle lives? (food/moisture) They ignore the carrots for moisture and choose to kill each other.



(5) Both the mealworms and beetles are in containers that're about 7"x14" (and 5" deep). It works fine for the mealworms, but I wonder if that's enough for the amount of beetles I have. How much room do beetles and aliens need? In the container I have about 35-40 beetles and about 30 aliens; I find about 5 new aliens a day, but about 5 are found dead in the beetle container, so it stays at about this amount. Some of the beetles are a little roughed-up, too.



(6) I found what appeared to be a brown-red mealworm beetle, except it was only 1/8"...is this a mealworm beetle?



(7) The beetles have this faint smell similar to spoiled peanuts. It's not strong, but faint smells bug me more than strong ones. What is this smell?



(8) Is this too many questions for one post? Should I have broken this up into several posts? lol
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-Marcus The Great

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