June 9th, 2022

An update about my mealworm colony. I recently reorganized after various iterations. What I’ve decided for setup is to use blended oats as substrate, and carrots as a regular water source. 

The main setup (photo 1) is still in a 3-drawer system 14”x12”x3” per drawer. 

• The top drawer is the youngest mealworms that are recently hatched and about 1 cm long. 

• The middle drawer has the older mealworms ranging from 1cm-3cm with some pupating occasionally. 

• The bottom drawer has Generation 2 adult darkling beetles (photo 4 and 5) which are typically about 1.5 cm long This is where they get busy and have eggs. 

• When the mealworms turn into pupa they are transferred into a different bucket (photo 2 and 3) where they can hatch into beetles. This will be my 3rd generation of beetles.

Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly

Oct 2021 -

took a creepy looking caterpillar home and thought I accidentally killed it.

Turns out it pupated. 

March 17, 2022 - butterfly emerged.

May 26, 2022

Leopard moth 

(bottom left)

May 27, 2022

Golden tortoise beetle 

(bottom right)

Neat unidentified moth 

(top photo)

June 1st - This is the smallest little jumping spider, so I gave him a teeny tiny mealworm.

 

June 5th - I found this ground beetle. Haven’t fully identified it, but I was considering making a little terrarium to watch the black beetle’s life cycle

I also found this grasshopper today (June 9) but I have lost track of time and space and marked it as June 6th. 

I kept him in a jar for the better part of the afternoon trying to convince him to eat a leaf but he wasn’t interested. I wanted to watch his tiny mouth chomp on it! 

My potato plants have become infested with spider mites (top picture on the photo listed as June 2022)

As a final hail Mary I’ve decided to dump the entire potato plant en masse into a bucket, sift through for bugs that I don’t want to drown, and fill the bucket with water, then spraying down the cloth planters. In the process I found this pupa from the Manduca genus. 

This pupa originates from a tomato hornworm and will hatch into a large moth. Since hornworms are a pest to my tomatoes I do not want to release this moth, so instead I bought an enclosure for it. 

Update Aug 27th, 2022: I don’t want to explain how, but the Spinx moth escaped and is out there somewhere destroying someone’s tomato plants.