Mealworms Alive — 2000

Get 2000 live and juicy mealworms to make your bluebirds and other wild birds feel right at home in your back yard. The mealworms are shipped by Priority Mail Monday through Thursday and are guaranteed to arrive alive. Sorry, we cannot ship mealworms out of the US.

Care instructions

Mealworms can be stored for several weeks (and sometimes months) in refrigeration. First remove the bag from the box and let them sit and come to room temperature. Then place them in the fridge for a few hours. This will slow them down and they will not be as hard to get out of the newspaper as they would if they were warm and active.

Transfer them to a shallow, smooth sided tray or tub. If the sides of your container are smooth enough a lid should not be necessary. If a lid is used it should be well ventilated, or your mealworms will become damp and die. Add a little bran, or crushed Wheaties, Cheerios, Corn Flakes, oatmeal, or cornmeal. Ideally, the worms and bran should be no more than 1-1/2 inches deep.

Refrigerate the container. If you have a way to keep mealworms at 45 degrees F., that would also be great -- maybe even better. But the refrigerator will do the job.

Remove your mealworms form the fridge once every 7 to 10 days and let them warm up to room temperature. Then feed them a carrot, or a slice of apple or raw potato for a few hours. This is how they get their drink of water and will stay fresh and plump.

Bluebirds absolutely adore mealworms, especially when they are raising a nest full of babies. They will quickly learn to come to the place where they know you offer them their favorite treat.

Natural sized mealworms

Some mealworms are treated with a hormone that forces them to keep growing and not metamorphose into their next life stage. The result is the oversized mealworms you may find advertised in many places.

Well, that treatment concerns us. We don't know if the hormone might harm the development of the baby birds who are fed those frankenworms. So we offer only medium-sized mealworms, ones that are guaranteed not to have been subjected to hormone treatment.

It works out just fine that way. When baby bluebirds first hatch, their parents bring them tiny food. Within a day or two of hatching, the birds are big enough to eat our medium-sized mealworms, and the parents are delighted to carry bill full after bill full to them.