breeding black worms
- Thread starter tigrey
- Start date
tigrey;3754939; said:
I tried my hand at this about 6 months ago.
The guide i found said no filtration was necessary
I used a few of the under bed storage bins you can find @ walmart/target.
I filled the bottom of the bins with brown paper towels ripped into pieces.
You have to use an airstone in each bin also.
You can feed a very small amount of pellets. I used algae wafers.
I didn't have much success I must say =[
I do it from a guide I found online
Here is the info I used
"Hmm... that link that Mike posted doesn't seem to work ... perhaps things got shifted around when we moved to the new server.
I've been keeping blackworms in a tupperwares on my shelf with quite some success. Each tupperware is about 2-1/2 gal filled to about 4 inches of water with an airstone in the middle.
For substrate, I use brown paper bags from the grocery store. The brown paper is torn up into approx. 3-4 inches long square pieces and simply dropped into the tupperware. The paper will float at first, but leave it there for a couple of hours, and with the airstone bubbling away at it, it sinks to the bottom. Just simply stick some blackworms into that baby and that's basically it. I add new paper to the tupperware when the old paper in there has almost broken down completely.
For feeding, i use flake food a little at a time. The flake is red in color so i only feed when they have consumed all the food from the previous feeding. I.e when all the red disappears. Currently, it takes about a day and a half for it to disappear.
I do 75% waterchanges every week. Very soon the paper will start to break down and you will have all this fiber floating in the the water with the worms. I find that waterchanges removes some of the excess fiber and probably removes a good amount of waste.
As for harvesting, I have yet to find a simple way without picking up some paper fiber as well. Maybe somone here has an idea? So far the most effective way i have used is by using cheesecloth. I made a little cheesecloth cup by wraping cheesecloth over a cylindrical wire frame. Partially submerge the cheesecloth in a bowl of water, place some worms from the tupperware into the cup, and after half an hour or so, the worms would have made their way out of the cheesecloth and into the bowl of water, leaving the dead/ sickly worms and some of the paper fiber trapped in the cheesecloth. Rinse the bowl of worms a couple of times and then feed.
I also find that by stirring the entire culture once in a while, it'll agitate the worms and they will start spazzing out, contracting and jumping around. I also noticed that sometimes when they did this, they spazzed themselves broken into 2 parts.... imagine that! Maybe that's how they reproduce.. by spazzing out!.. so maybe agitating them a little bit might help the "birds and the bees" along. But i keep 6 cultures and harvest each for about 3 days... I'm not sure if this rate will be self sustaining in the long run, but for the past 2 months or so, it seems to be pretty ok.
Yikes... this turned out to be a pretty long post. I'll shut up now.
Cheers
Marc"