What do wax moths eat? Nothing?

CleaTheChameleon

CleaTheChameleon

New Member
Hello i have a bout 40 wax worm pupae that are going to hatch any day now and am willing to give some of local pickup and maybe shipping for free because i have so many. I wanted to know do they eat anything or no? If so what do they eat one just hatched out?
 
Stefan - breeding them is the easy part. I've found the hardest part is keeping the little blighters in the container! They are soooo tiny when they hatch that they crawl straight through the tights that I use as mesh as if it wasn't there at all, lol! :D I stand my container in a saucer of water so that those who escape can't take over my house!:eek: I'll take a pic later and post it for you.
 
They dont have mouths. They eat in the larval stage and thats all they need to last the throughout adulthood.
 
I feed the pupae to my cham. He loves them even more than the worms, and watches where i drop them around the cage, and as soon as i close the door he's there!

And Tiff is right, we had about 60 babies, and then the next day they were gone - i dread to think of where they ended up! :)
 
once you get the mixture right, they'll breed like nothing else. The mixture is tricky, too dry, and the larvae cannot eat it. Too moist and sticky, they canot move and will all die.

The NEXT problem is keeping enough of it in there. When deprived of food, the larvae go on a rampage in search of food. IF you have a couple dozen moths, you'll end up wiht many hundreds of baby worms - and they go through the food quickly. The next thing you know, all of the food was consumed, and they took off looking for more... all over the place. When they run out of energy, they pupate, even if they're tiny. I was picking off tiny itty bitty little cocoons from my closet walls (and all the boxes that were IN that closet)for 2 years afterwards...

Not to mention how annoying the tiny itty bitty moths that resulted were.
 
I bought 500 wax works from Mulberry and they must have been kept to warm, as most of them were cacooned apon arrival.

I tried to feed them off as moths, and that proved to be a disaster. I ended up with moths everywhere. They somehow found thier way out of the container and I was finding them all over the house for the next few weeks it seamed. I tossed the container out and vowed to never use them again!:cool:


So my advise to you is to keep them outside, or in the garage. They are little Houdini's!;)
 
Waxworms start off very small and are difficult to contain. They seem to be able to eat through t-shirts, cheesecloth, etc. and are small enough to climb out of the holes on a regular screen. Escapees won't do any harm...they usually just dry out and you have a mess to clean up. If you figure out a way to contain them they should be fine.
 
I keep the moths in a small petri dish since i only have 2 now. One big brown one and a small white one. Can anyone identify the genders?
 
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