I raise meal worms and in my
experience, their health and the health of the creatures that eat them is very much dependent on their diet. I have raised meal worms on wheat bran exclusively, and on other diets, and I have no doubt that they are much healthier on a better diet. My animals that eat them are also much healthier since the meal worm diet change. So here it is, exclusively for permies readers :) My secret meal worm diet:
2 parts high quality dog food
1 part
chicken layer food
1 part alfalfa pellets
Grind the ingredients up very fine in a blender. You either need an old blender you don't care much about, or a very good blender like the Ninja Blender. This stuff is pretty hard to grind. If you have some other kind of hand-grinder, it may work better, but I haven't tried it yet. If you use
chicken food in crumble form, that makes it somewhat easier.
All of these ingredients are easy to find locally for most people, provide great nutrition for your meal worms, and are very inexpensive considering the benefits. If you spend a half hour making their food/substrate mix, you won't have to do it more than once a month or less often, so it's a very small time investment. Since I have dogs, I have fresh dog food available all the time. I also have
chickens, but I don't feed crumbles, so I buy a bag of that and a bag of alfalfa pellets. A bag of each lasts a very long time and meal worms don't eat a tremendous amount. I also supplement their diet with small amounts of vegetables, cereal, greens, any kind of table scraps. Give only small amounts and remove whatever they don't eat so it doesn't go bad in the meal worm bin. Meal worms are very simple to raise and care for.
If you have any questions about raising these guys, I'm happy to
answer, but as I said, it's very simple.