Breeding Non-feeder Darkling Beetles

While on vacation out in Colorado earlier in the year, I collected a bunch of darkling beetles of 4 (5?) species. I really want to breed them, especially the extra large species I came across so other hobbyists can enjoy them. I've found a little bit of info here on Beetle Forum, but I was wondering if anyone had some first hand experience? I do have Orin's book on breeding beetles, but it's currently 3 hours away from my current location and I won't have access to it for another week or so. I'll get some pictures up in the next couple days as well once I sit down to photograph everyone. I believe they are all Eleodes, but there's one species I'm not as sure about (though sadly I only found one of those).

Any info, including pictures of your breeding setups, would be much appreciated!

although it's been a while since I've bred them I used to breed the ones you get from the pet industry as feeder mealworms and the larger variety, Super worms. May not be those species that you have but I'm sure their care is similar?
The way I would do it is just take a shoebox size sterilite or rubbermaid container, for bedding I would mix cornmeal, wheat germ, baby rice cereal and ground multivitamins. Put a couple of pieces of egg crate on the substrate, add your mealworms and poof, you have a beetle colony. As they breed and pupate the worms turn into a white pupae, it's hard and they don't move, a few weeks later they turn into the beetles and then they make more. You can feed them any organic vegetable matter, except hot peppers, onions, garlic.. stuff like that. You can simply put a slice of potato in a couple of spots in the container, or fruit on the top and they go to it and eat it. They will gain alot of moisture from that. If you are still concerned about hydration requirements I used to put a couple of chunks of cricket gel in there too.

The worms, the pupae and the adults can all live together quite happily. When the colony expanded beyond the capacity of the container I would split them into new containers. The beetles and pupae would go to a new container by themselves, same set up with the bedding and all that. I would put all the largest worms into another one and then spend the time to sift the little ones out of it. Every 6 months or so I would do this. I would get as many of the worms out as I could find and put them all in with the other worms, or two bins if you would rather but don't throw the parent colony bedding and stuff out just yet... over the next several weeks you will notice more worms showing up, that's the babies that were too little to see when you rehoused the rest of them.

When you're confident you've gotten as many as you can out of the parent tub, through it all away, you CAN go ahead and sift out shed exoskeletons of the worms and recycle but it's not really necessary.

enjoy, have fun.

---------- Post added 08-10-2014 at 01:42 AM ----------

I forgot to mention also, in addition to the other ingredients in the "bedding" I used to put a can of fish flakes in the mix too. Just a small - medium size jar and I'd kind of crunch the flakes up pretty good so there were just pretty small pieces.

Breeding is generally really easy. Most will readily breed and lay eggs. I keep all of my eleodes/phloeodes/coelocnemis together in a ten gallon tank without a lid.

I like to make my enclosures look more natural, using sand and objects from their habitat- I collected two beautiful lichen-encrusted slabs of oak wood, and I've noticed the mere presence of wood in an enclosure seems to calm them down- especially the osculans.



P.diabolicus hanging out with C. californicus on the water dish... They have a layer of sand/clay mix on the bottom, then on the back half of the tank, I have a big pile of coco fiber pushed back as a slope, then two slabs of Oak bark, then behind the bark I added more coco fiber, then between the slabs, I tried to make it look like the result of a mini landslide

I would personally leave the bits of exoskeleton in the substrate, the larvae will eat them, good calcium source! Eleodes dont need to be separated to pupate. Some species of eleodes in the southwest riparian zones may, however, pupate inside wood.

eleodes generally need moist substrate as larvae.