# Culturing flour beetles (the easy way)



## benmz (Feb 18, 2004)

Flour beetles are a great supplemental food source. They really help out when your fruit fly cultures crash and they are a great supplement to help vary our frogs' diet. One of the problems with feeding them is that most of our frogs don't really like the adult beetles and it is hard/messy to seperate the beetles from the larvae. There is a method to culturing the beetles and getting only larvae to feed out. Here is a method that Matt Mirabello has taught me and has worked with great success.

First you start out with a beetle culture that has been sitting for about 3 weeks. It should be loaded with adult beetles, larvae and eggs. Take this culture and sift out everything. 








Dump all of these guys into a new culture. You can also split them up to make even more cultures if you like. Cover both cultures and let them sit for about 2-3 weeks.

Now take the older culture that was sifted out the first time. It should look like this:









Sift the culture:
















Continue sifting until all the flour is sifted out.









You will notice that there are a few adult beetles, but not that many. I usually dump all this back into the now empty culture container.









From there I portion them out onto old yogurt container lids. I can usually get a good healthy feeding to all of my 8 tanks with 2 cultures. 









and place the lid(s) into your viv(s) and watch the food fest.










Any adult beetles will likely go uneaten, die in the tank. There should not be too many adults so your tank won't be overrun with them anyway. 

Now take the flour that was sifted and place it back into the container. Sift the culture you started 3 weeks ago. 









And place all the bugs into the clean culture. You can recycle the cultures like this for about 6 months before changing flour media. 

If your beetles cycle faster than 3 weeks just reduce the cycle to 2 weeks or vice versa. 

-Ben


----------



## melissa68 (Feb 16, 2004)

That is a good idea. I just did that to set up some new cultures - I never thought about cycling them over such a short period of time. Thanks for the hints.


----------



## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

Haha, I've been talking about this for years... good to finally see some photos of it tho. I always forget to take pics...

If you're getting adults and pupae when you sift, you need to shorten the time period you're working with by a few days to a week. I originally did 3 weeks because at the time I was in a dorm room that was relatively cold, but having the bugs sitting on a shelf at the top of a rack above lights has sped them up to the point where the rotation is every 2 weeks.


----------



## benmz (Feb 18, 2004)

Corey, the recent discussions prompted me to make it more visual. Glad you liked it.

Those feedings are a bit much. I could probably use less larvae and feed a bit more often instead.

I used to have a sifter where the holes were large enough to catch only the larger larvae. I would be able to feed from a culture, once a week during the cycle process. Alas, the sifter was lost during my last move.

-Ben


----------



## kj (Jan 15, 2006)

Ok few points, can we have this in the good food thread at the top of this section :lol: 

Next thing is, i had a bash at this, had one sitting for quite a while etc, but i sifted left the sifted out one but then when you sift it again there was not a thing there, so where did i go wrong was it because when i took the beetles out i also removed the bit of kitchen roll, did they lay there eggs on this ??? Where do there lie there eggs ??? 

Thanks KJ.


----------



## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

It depends on your temperature and the age of the beetles... they could be too old! Start your cultures with larvae and let the hatch to adults and keep track of how old your adults are (and/or regularly cycle new beetles in the breeder group, taking out some of the old ones and either feeding out or freezing).


----------

