Grubs are great! So I guess I am on my own here in saying I think maggots are awesome. I even go as far to share my house with them. Why would anyone do such a thing. I'll tell you why.
I breed mealworms to feed to the wild birds that visit my garden. Since I have been feeding mealworms out every day I have noticed a huge increase in bird numbers in my garden. This is great for the birds and great for me. I get to see the birds and I know where they are going to land so I can get great photos of them.
You can normally buy mealworms from pet shops. They are used to feed some types of reptiles and amphibians that people increasingly keep as pets. The mealworms sold in the shops are expensive and often literally on their last legs. Most shops don't have the time or space to keep their own breeding stock so they buy the mealworms from suppliers. This means the mealworms are old when you get them and will soon be no use for feeding to birds.
I have a simple breeding system that allows me to produce 200-400 mealworms per day without costing much money or taking up a huge amount of space. They do take up quite a bit of time though.
To breed them you have to get 2 or 3 tubs of mealworms and keep them until they go into a pupa. About a week later they hatch out into beetles. You want to leave beetles in a container with bran and cabbage for about 3 weeks then remove the beetles into another tank and keep putting tiny bits of cabbage in every day so that when the beetle eggs hatch the tiny grubs have food. They will slowly grow for about 8 weeks then should be large enough to feed to the birds. Once you have a system up and running you just have to maintain it.
The mealworms I feed out are full of goodness and lots of birds love them. They count on them during the hard winter and feed them to their chicks in the spring. It isn't always the obvious birds that come to feed on them either. I regularly get House Sparrows, Great Tits, Blue Tits, Blackbirds, Robins, Starlings and Magpies coming for the worms. I have also seen Horatio the squirrel come for them.
Here are some of my favourite photos of garden birds enjoying my mealworms. They really do provide so much entertainment.
No comments:
Post a Comment