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This is the first time I've attempted to raise waxworms from scratch. It's more of an experiement and learning experience really more than I really need a sustainable source of waxworms. Whether I keep up with it or not I don't know yet. I'm posting this just for the heck of it and as a sort of record keeping reference for me (or other folks) before I go and forget this stuff.

I did a lot of looking around on the internet for food recipies for rearing the larvae. In the end I chose to formulate my own based on the information I found from other sites.

Dry:
3-4 tablespoons - Bee pollen
24 tbl spoon (85g) - Gerber Rice baby cereal
24 tbl spoon (85g) - Quaker unprocessed wheat bran

Wet:
2 oz - glycerine
4 oz - pure clover honey

The above recipe after I made it I found made 1 lb worth of food. Because I am working for the first time on this and don't know if I will later find the process of raising waxworms to be my style, I didn't want to make up a huge batch of food initially. This is more along the lines of an experimental batch size.

I used a metal bowl to mix everything together. It was also easier to thoroughly mix everything by hand rather than a spoon (while wearing latex exam gloves).

I mixed the dry ingredients.
Added the glycerine to the dry and thoroughly mix.
Added the honey and thoroughly mix.

This resulted in a wonderful smelling but rather sticky granola-like mess. Knowing that the dry ingredients would likely take a while to soak up some of the moisture from the honey and glycerine I placed it all into a zip lock bag and let it sit over night (un-refrigerated).

The next day, the mixture had a consistancy similar to brown sugar. It was slighty tacky but no longer sticking to the skin and could be squeezed into a ball and also easily crumbled without really leaving any kind of sticky reside on the hands (in otherwords I'm guessing it was just right).

I placed the food into a glass jar as well as the few hundred waxworm eggs I had collected. Only time will tell if this will work out or not.

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Notes:

I saw some people used only baby cereal in their diets and others used only bran. I figured what the heck, why not just try an equal amount of both. There were recipes that used dog food or duck starter but I didn't really want to go in that direction.

Glycerine - a lot of recipes called for glycerine but they were also quick to point out not the wood rose kind as it was poisonous. I chose to not use the pharmecutical grade of glycerine and opted instead for food grade. The glycerine I purchased was the kind used for cake decorating as an additive for frosting to keep it a soft consistancy.
(the kind used to add to frosting for cake decorating).

Bee pollen seemed to be one of the common 'optional' additives to wax worm diets. Knowing that waxworms infest bee hives in the wild, I decided it would be worthwhile to include bee pollen in the diet. It certainly could not hurt.

As I researched later I read that:

Bee Pollen contains protein - as much as is found in beans or lentils. Bee Pollen also contains lipids, free amino acids, carbohydrates, calcium, manganese, phosphorous, iron, sodium, potassium, aluminum, magnesium, copper, pantothenic acid, nicotinic acid, thiamin, riboflavin, ascorbic acid (Vitamin C), vitamins D and E, enzymes and co-enzymes, pigments, xanthophyll, carotene, and sterols.

When it came to tracking down a source of bee pollen, however, I could only find nutritional supplement chewable tablets from a health food/vitamin store. The brand of tablets they had in stock also contained some additional ingredients - bee propolis and royal jelly. The tablets contained no artifical colors, preservatives, etc.

From what I have been able to determine in my research I think that I may have ended up with something better than what I was originally looking for (ie just straight bee pollen).

Bee propolis:

Bees adopted sterilization habits long before humans. The most sterile place in nature is the bee hive. Propolis is the natural substance responsible for neutralizing any bacteria, fungi or virus which enters the hive. One of the most powerful foods found in nature, Propolis is a highly complex mixture of waxes, resins, balsams, oils and a small amount of pollen.

Royal jelly:

The chemistry of royal jelly has been extensively studied and found to be a rich source of complete protein, containing all the essential amino acids, unsaturated fats, natural sugars, minerals and the B-vitamins (B-5 and B-6). The B vitamins were especially prominent, with pantothenic acid predominating.

Tests have shown that royal jelly does possess some slight antibacterial activity and can have an affect on the adrenal cortex, stimulating the adrenal glands to produce a positive reaction on increased metabolism, enhanced energy, and appetite.

The tablets I purchased was not a problem for me to work with. It was easy enough to crush and grind the soft tablets into powder with a mortar and pestle. The tablets were 500mg size. I believed I used about 21 tablets to come up with somewhere between 3-4 tablespoons worth of powder (i was not being too exact with my measuring).

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end notes.

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PHWyvern

Thanks for the post. It seems you have things well thought out. My question is, what type of store do I get glycerine from? If from a super market, what section? Cakes? The glycerine has been the hardest thing for me to find. I found pure bee pollen with no problem and use it in my cricket/roach gutload food.

I also was wondering how much overall did all the supplies cost to make the one batch and how far will one batch will last. Would be cool to see cost efficiency to breeding your own waxworms.

Anyone know if the moths are also nutritious? I know waxmoths are fatty little treats, but what about the moths?
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~ Juli ~
www.Polliwog-Design.com

>>Thanks for the post. It seems you have things well thought out. My question is, what type of store do I get glycerine from? If from a super market, what section? Cakes? The glycerine has been the hardest thing for me to find. I found pure bee pollen with no problem and use it in my cricket/roach gutload food.
>>

The glycerine I got from a craft/hobby store actually (Michaels formerly known as MJDesigns). They have a section of supplies for cake decorating. The cake baking section at the grocery stores here seem to be next to worthless when it comes to the decoration supplies and I didn't see any glycerine there hence having to resort to a hobby store. Your grocery stores however, may stock glycerine in the cake baking section.

>>I also was wondering how much overall did all the supplies cost to make the one batch and how far will one batch will last. Would be cool to see cost efficiency to breeding your own waxworms.
>>

Well. From what I have read, it takes approximately 1.5 lbs of waxworm diet to raise 500 worms to maturity.

Gerber Rice Cereal (85g box) $1.69
Glycerine (2oz) $1.99
Quaker Wheat bran (226g box) $1.89
Clover Honey (12oz) $3.39
Bee Pollen tablets (90 tablets) $4.99

After tax is added the cost comes to just under $15

In the long run even though I paid $15 for the ingredients to make the food, I have enough of the stuff left over (except for 2 items) that I could continue to use to make another 1-2 batches of the food. I actually have enough bee pollen tablets left to make 3 more batches. Really all I need is to buy some more rice cereal and some more glycerine. The glycerine came in 2oz bottles so one bottle per batch is very convenient for measuring sake.

If I were to average out the cost of the items based on the amount I actually used, that one batch of food I made really only cost me around $7.

It costs me $10 to buy 500 mature larvae plus the additional cost of shipping. It would seem to be slightly cost effective for me to raise my own waxworms (probably just save on shipping and have the luxury of knowing exactly what was fed to the waxworms). One thing that led me to attempting this is not that I really needed the full size waxworms. I have some small frogs and salamanders but purchased waxworms are too large for them. If I raised my own then I could theoretically pick out smaller worms as needed to fit the size of the amphibs in question and better vary their diet. The surplus of the full size larvae would never be a problem - plenty of opportunity for the bearded dragons and box/wood turtles to chow down on them as snacks.

>>Anyone know if the moths are also nutritious? I know waxmoths are fatty little treats, but what about the moths?
>>-----
>>~ Juli ~

I have done some looking around but cannot find anything to state what the nutrtional content of the moths are - just the larvae. I would hazzard a guess that they are lower in fat content (possibly due the pysical/physiological changes they've gone through), but whether or not their overall composition of nutrients is balanced more towards healthy compared to the fatty larvae that I cannot say. I would say that just based on the dusty scales of the wings and small body size (ie the moths are mostly wings now), they probably should still not make up any large portion of an animals diet (primarily small animals versus large animals - all that excess useless body parts could lead to gut impaction and/or just taking up space that could better be served by other food items). I'm gonna try emailing some folks to see if they may know where to locate nutritional info on the moths (assuming it even exists).
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PHWyvern

Just another place to find glycrin in your grocery store. It's also used as a skin softener and I actually find it near the first aid stuff.
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Chantel a.k.a. sillygirl
"I came, I saw, I adopted"

2.4.0 green anoles (Stumpy (M)), and the rest remain nameless.
2.2.0 green tree frogs (Romeo & Juliet, Bonnie & Clyde)
0.0.3 D. tinctorius (Cobalt froglets)
0.0.1 Anerythristic 'B' (Charcoal)corn snake (Popcorn)
0.0.1 Snow Corn (KandyKorn)
0.2 Amel Corns (KornSilk & KornMuffin)
0.0.1 Giant African Millipede
2.4 Domestic house cats (Bad Boy (m), Bart(m),Sasha(F),Little Bit(F),Spirit(F)
1.0 Rottweiler (Jake)
1.2 Rats (new additions with no names yet)
1.0 Husband (David, who loves all my critters too)

Well,

This is an update on my previous post. I know I read that it cantake 5-6 weeks to get results. It's been 25 days now since I started my first waxworm culture. And I am actually quite amazed at the results.

I had been checking the jar every few days since I first put the eggs into medium. After many many days, I finally noticed a single nearly microscopic waxworm (pinhead cricket size) moving around on one particular mound of medium. Great... the eggs were finally hatching!

Several more days went by and I checked the jar again. Ack. Still only that one single worm moving about on that same mound as before but it was noticably larger in size (about 1/4" now) and you could see a fine silk nest now covering his little mound. I was bummed. I thought dang.. all those eggs and only ONE hatched. oh well. This was my first time raising waxworms, maybe I just got unlucky with a batch of infertile eggs. I put the jar back up on the shelf. That was about a week ago.

Today I figured I'd check up on my poor lonely waxwormie. I wasn't looking when I reached to the back of the shelf I had the jar sitting on and picked it up. I nearly dropped the dang thing...that glass jar was HOT to the touch! It was almost like it had just come out of the dishwasher it was that hot. I looked into the jar and it was just covered in silk and hundreds of worms of all sizes were all over....from tiny hatchling worms to fatter almost half grown worms.

How in the world could they have exploded in population & size in just a week's time? I swear when I checked the jar the week before all I saw was that one single solitary worm moving around...nothing else.

I had to add more medium to jar that's for sure...a large chunk of what I had in there was pretty much gone. I certainly need to get more jars setup to divide the culture between as the one quart jar I started is not going to hold all of these worms much longer.

I would say this experiement is turning out just fine after all.
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PHWyvern