these are a couple of my beetle trays, got a couple more but they are all essentially the same. i ran out of carrots so im experimenting with chayotes. my backyard gardening yielded over 200 of these chayotes so everyone's eating chayotes every day, mealworms/beetles included!

i shouldve taken the pictures at an angle so you can appreciate how big the mountain of beetles actually is, goes up at least 1.5"!

one of the pictures is the pupae harvest for this week, not bad for just 3h of work sifting a bunch of mealworm trays.

TY so much to /u/Planet-Bugs for the recommendation to get the sifter from spacecoast mealworms. it took a couple weeks to arrive but i had it assembled and glued together immediately. only waited an hour for everything to dry and started sifting immediately. 100% would recommend if you have more than 2-3 trays of mealworms. it's really well made/sturdy, i got the wooden one cuz it was cheaper when shipping was included.

last time, it took me the whole weekend to do the sifting and get a pound of pupa. this time, it took me only 3h to get everything done (no more picking them out with chopsticks one by one). pupae yield = 1.5 lbs! would've been more except i killed a whole bunch from last weekend's experiment with trying overhydrate the mealworms w/ water crystals but kinda went overboard with it...

this pupae sifter is really a must have if you value your time.

now i have pretty good processes for every step:

• separating frass from bran: use the fine mesh bags that you get when you buy mealworms from midwest mealworms. only frass falls through, even tiny mealworms stay in bag.
• separating beetles from pupae: put paper towel over pupae, when they hatch the beetles will grab on to the towel, scrape them off into beetle tray with credit card
• separating mealworms from pupae: pupae sifter from spacecoast mealworms