Lizzie Mack

A beetle farm is a great way to watch the life-cycle of insects and to see how beetles grow from eggs all the way through to adulthood.

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 You will need:

• A large see-through tub or a small aquarium with a lid.

• Bran (a ground-up grain similar to flour that is available from supermarkets)

• 10 live mealworms (available from pet shops)

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Method

1. To begin, make sure your tub is clean and dry. Poke a few very small holes in the lid to provide ventilation.

2. Place a 6 cm layer of bran in the bottom of the container – this will be both their food and their habitat - and gently place your mealworms in their new home.  Keep your beetle farm in a warm spot out of direct sunlight.  They don’t like being too hot or too cold. 

3. Add more bran to your farm when it is needed and keep watching. Your mealworms will grow longer and plumper until they are about a centimetre long. Then they will begin to transform into the next stage of their lifecycle, the pupa.  This is the stage when they are making the change from worm-like creatures into proper beetles.  As the beetles emerge from the pupal case, they will be pale and quite soft. Over the next few hours their exoskeletons will harden in the air and darken to their adult colouring. Although they have wings, adult beetles rarely fly, preferring to scurry around on the surface of the soil where they will feed on bran and small pieces of vegetables or fruit.

4. Top the bran with a few pieces of bark or small pieces of rotting wood.  Clean out any pieces of vegetable matter before it begins to rot.  When you have completed your observations you can release your pets into your compost heap.

 

You can keep a record of :

• how long each life cycle lasts

• how much they eat

• how many of your mealworms make the transformation into adulthood

• what time of day your mealworms are most active – and how about the adult beetles? Is it the same?