HELP! Foreign bugs in feeder bowl - don't appear to be mites or pinheads...??

I was doing cleaning rounds last night and when I pulled a mealworm bowl from one of my female's cages, I found an unpleasant surprise:

Some of my herps have mealie bowls in with them at all times - the mealworms are replaced every night with freshly gutloaded ones. I breed some of my own mealworms and purchase the rest in bulk locally. The dish I grabbed from this female's cage had a vitamin powder base and contained 2 mealies that had died, some live ones, and 3 that had pupated overnight (I don't refrigerate the mealie colonies)

Her bowl had a handful of tiny, cream-coloured insects in it. They're smaller than fleas, must be very soft-shelled because they squish with the touch of a finger, and they DONT jump. I *don't* think they're Springtails, Pinhead Crickets, or mites...but I could be wrong, of course! As for transportation mediums, she does get fed adult crickets every 3 weeks and she's gravid so she's got a laying tuppie filled with 3/4 peat moss, 1/4 vermiculite. She also gets Supers and Waxies...but I've never had unwanted bugs come in with those shipments before. It honestly looks like they came in on one of the mealies that had died (the 2 dead ones were from an outside shipment). After freaking out and thoroughly sanitizing my hands (!) I checked out my other herps and the mealworm breeding tubs - No sign of any foreign insects anywhere else... none even in my few "natural" terrariums which is the first place I'd expect to find invading insects.

This female is in one of my Melamine display stacks with a glass door, not a rack, which fortunately isolates her habitat from the other cages in the display stacks slightly more. I spent almost 30 minutes inspecting her cage for any more of these bugs and only found 2 more right on the paper towel where the mealie dish had been...then I detailed EVERYTHING, including all the bowls, calcium dishes, the pupa-hatching container linked to her batch of mealies, etc. I also tossed all the mealworms & mealie pupae that might have come into contact with "The Bugs".

Any help/advice would be extremely appreciated! It looks like I got rid of the few that I encountered but I'm at a loss here...I really want to know what these little insects are so if there are any eggs around, I can be sure that they've been eradicated.

I have had fruitflies lay eggs that hatched and turned into their little larvae. They were small cream colored as you described.

Were they larvae, pupae, or adults?(I think I have that right)

That could be grain mites, check your mealworm bedding and the area where you store oatmeal, bran...etc.

It almost sounds like fruit fly larve to me, so aka itsy bitsy maggots lol! You might have had a fruit fly buzzing around and that dead mealie was the perfect place for her young to hatch!

But it also could be grain mites If you say the tubs are completely clean however, makes me think fruit flies.

... or pinworms. They're not uncommon when using crickets. Doesn't sound like a real problem - you could always give them a dot of Panacur.

I didn't think pinworms were visable to the naked eye?
I went through this awhile back....turned out to be a sort of grain mite..stick a piece of carrot or potatoe near your mealworm colony or near where these critters where. In a day or so you will see it coated with these little pests...With a good cleaning and the potatoe trick, I haven't had them back. I have heard that they can come in the mealworm bedding....

Well, the jury is still out on this one...

Funny you should mention Fruit Flies...we're remodeling the house/have a ton of construction going on: 2 weeks ago we got home from work to find an annoying fruit fly congregation in the kitchen. I figured the little bugs were cold so they'd come in through the open doors/walls/windows - Alas, no fruit or food for them to eat at our place so they spent the next week annoying the crap out of us with repeated suicide attempts in any and all available wine glasses (they prefer red - especially expensive zins...lol)

Anyways, the bugs in the dish were few but looked like insects, not larva/wormies or pupae...so I don't think they're related to the Fruit fly problem. But they also don't seem to be grain mites or mould mites and the humidity in both the cage and feeder rooms also seems way too low.

Apart from the one incident that has me concerned, I haven't seen any other "bugs". There's no grain in with the feeders in the cages - there's nothing the habitats for unwanted insects to feed on or lay eggs on, so I suppose I'll just keep up the rigorous cleanings and hope for the best...

Yeah...definitely NOT pinworms or anything that scary - thank God the melamine stacks are black and 'pore-less' because if there is anything in there of noticeable to the naked-eye, it will be rather visible and quite contained. But man, I shoulda grabbed the microscope before squishing the couple of them I found!

Nothing in the female's humid hide bedding, nothing on her, her paper towel, or her current dishes...very strange. I'm hoping it was an isolated incident where something came in on those couple mealies...

I also have to add that, while I'm near a major metropolis, I live bordering nature reserves that span for hundreds of miles, so as we're anti-pesticide spraying (baby humans and mammals around) there are so many bugs around that they could have been anything. I mean, it looks like a frickin' Disney scene from Bambi when we look out the windows in the morning - deer, jackrabbits, falcons, hawks, coyotes...and about 2 million arachnid/scary insect species I've never encounted anywhere else! (I actually have a 4-inch spider outside one of the doors that we named "Charlotte" after "Charlotte's web"...she's got at least 6 "minions" within a few feet of her and they're definitely not her babies...)