Bugs Make Great Pets
Just using items you probably have in your kitchen pantry we are going to turn fifty wax worms into thousands of wax worms in just six weeks. We will go over the wax worm life cycle and also discuss the supplies you will need to breed your own wax worms.
Wax worms are great bait for pan fish like bluegill and crappie. They also make great feeders for reptiles and some birds.
Photo credit Springer Link
We will be using a heat mat below our breeding container to get the temperatures up to at least 80 F to speed up the breeding process. The goal is to complete the wax worm life cycle in 6 weeks.
Just mix the oats and honey and glycerin with your hands until its like a bread dough. I did add about a shot glass of water to the mixture to give it more moisture. I also chopped up the oats in my ninja blender so the oats where like flour.
Once you have everything mixed up you add the wax worm larva. I started with fifty wax worms which I bought at the bait store. We are now ready for nature to take over.
I placed the container on the heat pad and put everything into a dark closet. Within 5 days 90% of the larva had already turned into pupae. If you don’t have a heat mat try keeping it in the warmest place in your house. Now we wait for the pupae to hatch into moths which I’m hoping will happen after a week.
One week later the moths began to hatch. I also added some crumbled balls of paper in the container and the moths seem to like crawling on them and hopefully begin laying eggs.
After you master breeding wax worms try out breeding Superworms here.