I got mine from Pets at Home, where 120g cost me £6. Ensure you buy ‘mini’ or ‘standard’ and not ‘giant’ mealworms, as these appear to have been dusted with a hormone powder which makes them grow larger, but renders them infertile. You can find your starter mealworms easily online, or from large or specialist pet shops. Starting your own meal worm farm Sourcing your breeding stock They lay dormant for a week or more as a pupae until they finally crawl out of this last shell as a beetle. This isn’t their most attractive stage it has to be said, they resemble weird little aliens.As they grow, they shed their exoskeletons several times until, with the last shed, they morph into a Pupae. They are used to feed reptiles, birds and fish. They start off teeny and very difficult to see, then grow to about an inch or so. They are a fantastically nutritious live food, consisting of *20% pure protein and *12% fat, both of which are difficult to grow for chickens from plants.

The eggs hatch out into larvae, or meal worms, at which point they become the most interesting to us.(My eyesight must be failing as I’ve never actually seen an egg, and as the macro function on my camera is broken, I had little hope of snapping one either.) They become sexually mature after a week or so, mate and lay eggs which are apparently the size of this full stop. They are white like this for a few hours before turning brown, then black. In the first picture is a freshly hatched Darkling beetle.They are all sat in the bowl of a teaspoon to give you an idea of their size. This is 3 of the 4 stages a mealworm ( Tenebrio molitor) goes through.

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