MEALWORM SHORTAGE!!!
 

Boy, we are in deep doo-doo! We are in a national crisis with the mealworm shortage... time to look at alternative feeding solutions. Can any of you bug suppliers help us gecko breeders out??? Incentives? Price deals?

Marcia, I grew a substantial number of mealworms on tubs of bran for a while, it takes a few months to get an operation going but with a small amount of initial expense and effort, you could have a mealworm ranch yourself.

When you have to raise enough mealworms to feed hundreds of leopard geckos, you spend just as much time dealing with the bugs as you do leos. It becomes counterproductive and it gets really old. I know because I did it for a few years. I think I'm just gonna switch back to crickets for awhile, they are more nutritious anyway. I just can't stand cleaning the cricket bin out every day *gag*/

Kelli is right. I go through over 14,000 feeders a week, and just don't have the space or time to raise my own feeders to be able to supply the number of geckos I have to feed... :(

Why not switch to roaches?
I know of quite a few who have had great success with geckos and roaches.

I tried feeding my geckos roaches but the problem was only about half of them would eat them. Same thing with silkworms. Nearly all of my adults love superworms though, so they will mostly be getting those. The younguns will have to be fed crickets for awhile. Not that they will mind, every gecko I have ever owned goes nuts for a cricket.

That's what I'm going to be doing too, Kelli. I just ordered 4,000 supers, and I still have a few mealies for the babies (until I run out) and I still have crickets. Icky crickets............. Man, this shortage sucks. :no01:

And I tried to do the roach thing, but they creeped me out WAY to badly. :ack2:

LOL they creep me out also, especially when they flap their wings... ughhh... makes me nauseous!

So why is there a mealworm shortage?

I've heard a couple of different reasons but I still don't really understand why.