Confused flour beetle (Tribolium confusum)care
Introduction
Confused flour beetles are a great food source for a variety of amphibians, including frogs, toads and salamanders. They don’t require a lot of care or maintenance, and just grow/ breed on there own. Two parts of the life stage of these beetles can be fed to your animals, one is the beetle its self, which some frogs will take while others will not (but toads will take them no problem). The second live stage is the larvae. These look like very small waxmoth larvae, and can be fed to most amphibians though they are quite small so can not make up a lot of the amphibians diet.
Ingredients
- Strong brown bread flour
- powdered baby milk
- Materials
- A tub (I use a 240g popcorn tubs)
- Two mixing bowls
- some kitchen towel/ roll
- A fine sieve
- A tea strainer sieve
Method
Take the mixing bowl and take the fine sieve, and pour some of the “strong brown bread flour” into the sieve and sieve it into the mixing bowl, this is to remove all large bits in the flour you will find out later why this is a good idea. Once you got quite a large amount of the flour, you should use the tea strainer to sieve the flour into the other mixing bowl, this is to remove any more bits, and this is a personal reason which I will explain later on. Then once you got the flour into the mixing bowl in the other, you don’t need to wash it out, sieve some powdered baby milk into the bowl (this is because the baby milk can go into hard lumps in the tin). You should aim to get about 1/4 (milk powder/ flour) but note I don’t really measure it out; most other people don’t measure it out either. So then once you have the two mixing tubs with the flour in one and the smaller amount of milk powder in the other you can mix them together. Once mixed you can get your tub, make sure it has been cleaned out well and dried, and place the mixed up flour into the bottom off the tub. Then get some paper towel screw it up and place some balls of it on top of the flour. Then take the lid, you should make quite a few holes in the lid or you can take a bit off the lid off and replace with some very fine mesh. Place lid on to the culture then you are ready to go, just empty your starter culture into the tub, flour and all as it will have eggs in. That is it leave it and the population will keep on growing.
Harvest
To harvest the beetles simply just pick them off the kitchen towel, and feed them. To harvest to the larvae, is a bit trickier this is where sieving the flour comes in handy, and where sieving it again. You should take a mixing bowl, or if you like sieve back into the culture, take a hand full off the flour mix, and sieve and you should end up with a few larvae. I like to use the tea strainer to get the larvae out as this will stop little larvae falling out of the big sieve, this is just may way as I like to have different sizes on hand ( to help with this I have a few tubs set-up as well).
Photos
Tricolor eating the larvae: