My birds like mealworms, so I’m raising mealworms. I’m not going to take a bunch of pictures of my setup, but it’s pretty simple, so I’ll describe it.

You know those sets of plastic drawers you can get at home improvement stores? Some people use them as dressers. I got one of those. I cut the bottom out of the top drawer and glued in some aluminum screen. The two bottom drawers stay as-is.

Mealworms are the larvae of a species of darkling beetle, so the worms I bought for my initial breeder stock will, in a few weeks, metamorphose into pupae, and then into adult beetles. Those beetles will lay eggs, which, along with any hatchling larvae, will fall through the screen into the lower drawer. When that drawer begins to fill with worms, I’ll swap it with the one below it, and of course, start adding mealworms to the morning feed.

Extra worms can be kept dormant in the refrigerator, but for this setup I keep the room warm. The best bedding/food for mealworms and beetles is wheat bran, which I had to special order, so in the meantime I’m using oatmeal and bran flakes. For water they get some chunks of raw carrot, potato, or apple.

If the beetles are getting too old, they can go in the feed as well. And if I lose some outside or in the cracks in the floor, who cares? If I decide I don’t want to raise worms anymore, no problem — feed them to the birds. Or the pig. She’ll eat their bedding and vegetables too, though no one around here especially loves carrots.

A few tips: 1) Use smooth plastic or glass containers. 2) You don’t have to do the screen bottom, but it’ll save you some work. 3) Shoe Goo and other members of the Goo family stick better to plastic than epoxy; make sure to thoroughly embed the screen in the Goo and be certain there are no gaps the beetles can squeeze through. 4) Cutting the plastic bottom is tricky and can cause it to crack, especially if it moves around when you’re cutting it, so be careful. It might help to heat it a little but I’m not going to tell you how to do that. 5) If you’re using one of those big drawers like I have, leave a strip of the bottom intact across the middle of the drawer so that when you pull it open, the strain is on that strip of hard plastic and not on the screen you glued in. You don’t want the drawer to flex too much or your Goo can loosen. And no one likes loose Goo. 6) Don’t feed mealworms to baby chicks until they’re about a week old, and don’t put chicks under a week old in with older chicks that have been fed mealworms in the past. This goes for the freeze-dried mealworms, too. Why? Because baby chick toes of a certain size look a lot like mealworms, and the chicks will try to rip each other’s feet off. It can be surprisingly brutal. 7) Speaking of brutal, don’t leave adult beetles in the same container with eggs and larvae; if you’re not using a screen bottom, you’ll have to separate them by hand. If you leave them, they may eat the eggs and larvae. 8) I’m raising them for birds, but a lot of people raise mealworms for reptiles and amphibians to eat. If you do that, you can gut-load them with things you want your animals to eat but might otherwise struggle to get into them. I’m thinking about how I might gut-load them for chickens, too. 9) Finally, some people eat mealworms. I won’t be one of them, but I’m not telling you what to do. I just think you should know that a dead, rotten mealworm smells remarkably like an infected ingrown toenail, and that might ruin them for you as a late night snack. Or maybe you’ll develop a taste for infected toe juices. How your mind works is really none of my business.