Reptile & Amphibian Forums

sorry for my bad spelling...

MS

First... start out with about 100 or so superworms... Find yourself one of those art supplies holders with the individual compartments (like they put embroidery floss or beads in. Or fish and tackle storage cases)...put small ventilation holes in the space over each compartment and into that put 1 superworm in each compartment. Store them in a warm, dark place and they'll pupate. After they pupate take them from the storage box and put them onto a substrate of mixed grains and cereals (baby cereal, ground up dog food, sunflower seeds, dried milk dried potatoes..these are just some of the things you can mix together)Provide toilet paper rolls...or some pieces of bark or mulch for them to lay eggs on when they hatch into beetles. Provide them with moisture in the form of veggies after they've turned into beetles and then let them be for a while. When you start seeing signs of baby superworms...you can start another container with the same substrate mix.. move all the adult beetles into it and start the process again. The beetles are quite long lived as far as I can tell.. barring too much heat or too little moisture. I've got a couple hundred growing in one drawer now and another few hundred in another drawer. This is the method I used to do it. I'm sure there's others but this worked for me.

Do you have to feed them when you stress-induce pupation? In other words, do you need a little grain or something in their small enclosures?

Nope.. no substrate and no moisture.... Everytime I tried to do that... they never pupated and just died on me. So I removed both and finally got pupae... Took me almost a month to get enough beetles to start producing them.. but once you do.. they'll take off.. My first bacth of Superworm babies are now about.. an inch and a half long..and still growing..

How big do they need to be? How do you know if they're mature enough to pupate?

They'll be roughly the 3/4 of the length of your index finger and about as thick as a pencil.. though maybe a little slimmer. Not much. They get quite large. You want to take only the largest and most active to pupate. They'll be the better breeder stock.

About that yeah. Really, its trial and error... I had some that I thought were ready to pupate but they just died on me. Luckily my rats don't care if its alive or dead..they get the dead insects that my lizards won't eat..