If you knew that nearly 86.5% geckos die very young and within two years of their captivity, then you’re going to discover in this message how to stop that from happening. True, it’s not easy to raise a Tokay gecko as pet.
With the geckos originally coming from deserts, the biggest problem that most owners face is creating the right kind of environment for the gecko to comfortably grow up in outside their natural habitat.
Continue reading Tokay Gecko Lizard Care Information
Most of our customers who buy live worms and crickets for bait, use those worms and crickets live on the end of their fishing hooks. Many also use preserved bait that was once alive as part of their bait repertoire.
What does a fisherman do with all of those extra giant mealworms, redworms, European Night Crawlers, African Nightcrawlers, Crickets and Waxworms at the end of the season? Many let them die, or throw them away, and some will try to breed them. Why not preserve them so that you will have bait well into the future? The cost savings, in the long run, could well be worth the upfront costs of the preservatives used in the process.
Think about the possibilities of being able to buy grubs, Bloodworms, leeches, meal worms, frogs, flies, pork, bees or anything that you might find in the wild for bait, and preserve them for future use with just a few ingredients that you can find right using the links below, or even from your local pharmacy.
I have found cases of small booklets in our office by Charlie Morgan, written in 1970, titled How To Preserve Bait of All Kinds. We purchased cases of this booklet a while back and we are offering them at cost to you. Shipping is included in the price. You can see that the booklet is going for $10 and $25 on Ebay and Amazon, but we bought these in bulk about 15 years ago and we are offering them to you for $5.95 with free shipping via US mail. The booklets are 24 pages long so they are easy to read and follow.
It is a bit dated and does not mention how to dispose of the ingredients used to preserve bait. I will caution you that you should only preserve bait if you are planning on selling preserved bait, have a means to dispose of the ingredients and have adequate latex gloves, goggles and other protective clothing and ventilation.
The booklet has a great deal of information on exactly how to preserve bait and even some tips on caring for and growing some of organisms used for bait. It also touches upon packaging and selling the bait. Heck, the booklet even explains how to preserve pork rinds.
If you are looking to preserve a great deal of bait, or want to start a small bait business, this booklet can get you well on your way. It also just makes for an interesting read for anyone who might be interested in how it is done.
There are really 3 ingredients that Charlie Morgan mentions and I have placed links to where you can find those ingredients below. They are still readily available.
Get Your Booklet Now While Supplies Last.
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2. Sodium Benzoate
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3. Anise Oil
[phpbay keywords=”anise oil” num=”3″ siteid=”1″ sortorder=”BestMatch” templatename=”columns” columns=”3″ paging=”true”]
Sugar Gliders love mealworms. Did you know that? Many of our Wormman.com customers are Sugar Glider owners and they tell us how much their Sugar Gliders eat mealworms like they are candy, so we figured that this guide might help our Sugar Glider moms and dads.
Some of the reviews that we have received:
“A fantastic guide to these wonderful little animals. It covered everything I needed to know. I now consider myself an expert on sugar gliders and have the confidence to properly look after them.”
“It’s great to have found such a comprehensive and well written book that provides both the positive and negative sides of owning sugar gliders. I now feel fully prepared. This book is a keeper!”
Continue reading Sugar Gliders Or Sugar Bears Information Guide
Today I am going to write about worm composting.
Keeping a compost pile going year round in New Jersey is a challenge, especially this year because we had almost two solid weeks at zero degrees. If you’d rather not go out into the cold and snow to dumb your kitchen scraps on your rock solid, frozen, compost pile, consider setting up a worm composting system indoors. You can keep this going year round. Worms will process your kitchen, paper and cardboard scraps.
Start your vermicomposting project on a small scale, and expand as you learn. You can graduate to bigger and bigger worm bins, and more worms until you eventually graduate onto a multiple bin system, or even on to a large worm bed.
To get started, you’ll need a worm bin, some bedding, some water, the right kind of worms and some food.
Try a 10-gallon plastic tub for starters. You can get one from Walmart for $5. Here is a video that I made about that.
Drill 8 to 12 quarter-inch holes in the base of the tub for drainage, and then drill some half-inch holes along the upper edge on both sides for air circulation. Nest your tub into a plastic tray on top of blocks, or upside down plant pots in my case. Don’t worry that the worms are going to try to escape through the holes, they would rather stay in the bin unless there’s something very wrong inside the bin. Your bins should be no more than 18 inches deep so that the material in the bin doesn’t become too compacted. The worms need to be able to move freely through the bin, and they need plenty of air.
Bedding is the stuff in which the worms crawl around, and where you bury your food. It needs to be light and moist and fluffy. My favorite bedding is shredded newspaper with some shredded leaves or coconut coir added in.
The type of worms that you need for worm compost, or vermiculture are called Red Wiggler, or Eisenia fetida. They’re much smaller than earthworms, and they reproduce really well in captivity. They process a lot of organic matter, and they don’t mind being disturbed. Regular earthworms that you find in your garden will not work for composting. Those worms burrow very deeply in the cool soil, and they do not survive when kept in a container. You can order Red Wigglers from a garden supply catalog a bait shop, or here at Wormman.com
How many worms do you need, and what can you feed them? Get yourself a small kitchen scale, and weigh the food scraps that you generate every day for one week. That means fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, tea bags, and grains. No meat, bones, fatty products, or dairy. Worms can process about half their weight in food per day. If you generate an average of four ounces of food scraps per day, then you would need eight ounces of worms in your bin in order to process the food that you’re going to be adding on a daily basis.
Head on over to How Many Worms do I need and they will calculate it for you.
If you start with a smaller amount of worms, just feed them less. Their population will grow, and you’ll be able to feed them more over time. When you get your worms, you want to sprinkle them on top of the bedding. Remember, the bedding needs moist but not wet, and should be fluffy.
Then put the lid on the bin. They will quickly burrow down into the bedding. On your lid, take a piece of paper and draw a grid with eight equal sections. Every time you feed your worms, you’ll put the food in a different section, and you can mark the date that you put it then there. You’ll go in a clockwise direction around the bin. The worms will follow the food source. By the time you get back to that first spot, you should no longer recognize the food that you put in there. If you can still see recognizable food, then you shouldn’t put anymore in until it’s gone. I put eight ounces of worms in this moist bedding, and here I have four ounces of food scraps. I’m going to start in the section number one, just pull the bedding aside and bury the food shallowly.
That’s the extent of how you feed them. You put the lid back on, and put the bin in its nesting tray. Be careful that you don’t overload your bin with food. If you do, it can become smelly and you can develop a fruit fly problem. You want to go at the pace that the worms can consume. Take it slowly. It’s normal to see molds and very tiny creatures inside your worm bin. They’re all part of the worm bin web of life. Now here we’re fast forwarding to a bin that has been operating for several months. It looks quite different in here, much darker material. The bin will gradually fill with worm droppings or worm castings as they consume the food and the bedding that you put in here. This is a nutrient-rich material that you can put on your garden.
Once every few months, you’re going to need to harvest the castings from the bin, and then put the worms back in with fresh bedding to keep them going. Get yourself a sheet of plastic, and then scoop out the composted material. You can create a little windrow or some small cone-shaped piles. The worms that are in this material will quickly burrow down to the bottom of the pile.
They don’t like being exposed to light or dry air. One way to make them move a little more quickly is to set up a light and shine it right on the pile. You have to wait a few minutes, just continuously brush the composted material aside. The worms will continue to burrow down to the bottom of the pile to the point where eventually all you’ll have left is a pile of worms, and a separated pile of composted material.
The end product, or worm castings can go into your garden or be mixed with potting soil for houseplants.
If you are worried about flies, make sure that you bury your food scraps as outlined in the grid system above.
Why spend $90 per 3# package? What you want is a bee swarm! Just buy the Swarm Trapping book and get your bees for (almost) free!
Yea, I’m McCartney, that YouTube Beekeeper guy. And I’m passionate about bees and beekeeping and am the author of Swarm Traps and Bait Hives. I’ve really enjoyed Swarm Trapping and wrote the book on it so others can enjoy this great way to get FREE BEES! (well…kind of free.)
Continue reading Catch Free Bees!
THIS MIGHT WORK FOR OTHER PEOPLE, BUT HOW DO I KNOW IT WILL WORK FOR ME? It’s easy to look at a self sufficient garden thriving and delivering your favorite fruits, vegetables, herbs spices, flowers, and think that it is somehow different than your garden. But it was just a few years ago that I was working hand over hand, on the verge of giving up and throwin away money, time, and energy on my homes backyard. Every Gardener Should Know This Often people choose to go into gardening as a lifestyle to save money on groceries or as an enjoyable pastime. Meanwhile they think this will benefit their financial situation, however most gardening techniques are too expensive to effectively contribute to the well-being of an individual, family, or community. Cost of tools, equipment and garden startups are often not accounted for and may cause problems down the line. To get around this problem, I would like to invite you to start using a technique that will prove to be a resolution and will result in your garden having more value while saving output costs. I decided to journal my experiences at the Sonoma State Environmental Technology Garden where I worked throughout my college years. Here we produce thousands of pounds a year and donate it all to the local food bank for low income families around the county. Using these techniques in a backyard garden would allow a family to have an abundance of food, and the greatest thing about this type of garden is that it uses self-sufficiency to cut down on unnecessary work. I’m nobody special. I’m just a guy who learned and studied agroecology practices and found techniques that will work for anybody! I’m a guy who’s tried a…
All living creatures eat…most do anyway. Carnivores like Meat while Herbivores are like leaves. But do you know who really takes the dirt cake? Detritivores: literally, trash eaters. They eat decaying matter like leaves, grasses, and manure. Some of the best detritivores are Earthworms.
How does a slimey wiggly worm turn dead plants, decomposing animal bits, weird fungi, and even mold and manure into nutrient rich compost?
Let’s break down, and digest, the process of the worm’s end product. Worm castings are formed after the worm food takes a straight shot from mouth to anus with a brief stop in the gizzard to be ground up and then the gut where the garbage is broken down. Before we get to the chemistry, some biology and physics. Earthworms are part of a superfamily of invertebrates called megadriles that have fascinated Humans for centuries. Even Charles Darwin wrote a book on the glorious creatures. As I said, worms process food in a straight shot: Their guts don’t twist and turn like ours. Up front is a toothless mouth, then a series of muscles that suck detritus in.
Just after the earthworm mouth is a curious set of glands that secrete a milky liquid containing calcium carbonate – the same stuff that makes up seashells. The dirt where worms make their home has a lot of CO2 in it which can impact a worm’s body chemistry, making its blood more acidic. So this gland is a way for worms to balance out their CO2 with soil calcium, which, by the way, means less CO2 makes it into the atmosphere. Earthworms have a gizzard, too. Where churning muscles crush the incoming food thanks to bits of sand and rock the earthworm has sucked up. So the earthworm’s intestine receives some crushed dirt including plant bits like dead leaves and bark that no human could hope to digest. For us, a happy human gut is one that regularly has a bit of fiber pass on through. But earthworms eat almost entirely fiber, so how do they get any nutrients? Enter a quartet of enzymes: amylase, lipase, pepsin, and cellulase.
These specialized proteins chop and modify swallowed food into molecules the body can take in. We humans have three of these enzymes: amylase in our saliva breaks down starches. Worms just happen to keep their spit in their guts. Lipase breaks down fats so earthworms can digest plant oils. Then pepsin breaks down proteins to digest animal bits. But earthworms can make a dinner of all that vegetable-y fiber thanks to cellulase. As its name suggests, this enzyme breaks down cellulose, the hard fiber that gives leaves structure and lets trees stand tall with wood and bark. Given enough time, no dead tree is a match for Slimey! All forest litter is not a tasty dirt sandwich, however. Many plants contain toxins that defend them from hungry creatures. Polyphenols contain a class of toxic molecules that cause illness or death to insects. But earthworms, who can’t avoid munching polyphenols up, have molecules in their gut called drilodefensins. It seems only soil-dwelling megadriles contain drilodefensins, which is why they can chew right through those dead plants.
A few enzymes aren’t the only digestive trait we share with earthworms. We both have gut bacteria showing just how tiny microbes are. Not surprisingly, gut microbes in earthworms are soil bacteria that chew nitrogen out of the plant material, taking in nitrates and nitrites and expelling nitrogen gas in a process called denitrification. Which leads us to consider what comes out in the end … of the earthworm. Biologists call earthworm poop “castings”. Given what happens in worms’ guts, we here at Reactions call this chemically processed, calcium injected, black stuff, mana. So here’s why worm poop is a big deal. Earthworms munch up indigestible garbage and cast out soils that can support healthy ecosystems: Earthworms break down all that cellulose that could clutter up, then choke out forests. A herd of earthworms can munch over 20 tons of dead organic matter per acre per year: all around the world there are examples where they’ve transformed bad grazing land into bountiful fields. This is why composters love earthworms — they’re like earth’s little garbage people. Thanks little guys! Of course, it’s worth saying that there are invasive earthworms disrupting ecosystems in some places.
It’s not all sunshine and ponies in the earthworm world. The nitrogen returns to the atmosphere, eventually completing the nitrogen cycle, so other plants can mine that vital element anew and make food for organisms like us. And all those worms drill little tunnels through the soil to let air and water get deeper to feed strong roots of plants and trees.
What do you think? Want to try your hand at vermicomposting? Let us know below or go to http://www.wormman.com for some composting worms and supplies.
They are native to the southern United States but have been found as far north as New Jersey. They can be found in various warm places around the globe due to Human transport. They are often found under rocks heated by Sunshine or in warm compost heaps. The range from powder blue to light orange in color and we are currently working on a white variation. They have waxy grains on their exoskeleton that makes them look like they are covered in a soft blue powder.
Food: Fish flakes, alfalfa grass, dried leaves,
Brewer’s yeast and fruit and vegetable slices are happily
eaten by Porcellionides floria.
Sprinkle some Brewer’s yeast in a corner and mist it. The Isopods will eat that fungus. Remove any food items that mold other than the fungus from Brewer’s Yeast.
Temp Requirements: They like it warm. 75 to 85 degrees
will keep them breeding for you.
Enclosure: Any container with slick sides. A glass
aquarium, plastic bin or a shoe box with a lid are great
containers to start with. Drill holes in any container
that has a lid. Airflow is important.
Breeding: They will breed quickly and readily and
will often breed prior to reaching full size.
Ease of Care: Easy
Substrate: Coconut Coir Bedding, Peat moss or sterilized
leaf litter work well.
Humidity: Humid
Size: They get to be about a quarter in long.
Place of Origin Mediterranean.
Identifying Characteristics: Elongated, thin body with a powdery coating in blue or even orange. The blue variation is often confused with
Powdery Blue Isopods.
Powder-Blue Isopods, or “Powdery Blue’s, ‘Orange‘”,
are a fast growing, fast breeding isopod that will rapidly fill their enclosure with young. Keep segregated from other isopods because they will out-compete others for food because of their fast breeding. They are easy to care for and eat many different types of dried leaves, grasses and foods. They are fond of Oak Leaves, Alfalfa hay and fish flakes but will also eat many different food scraps.
They are native to the Mediterranean but can be found in various warm places around the globe. They are often found under rocks heated by Sunshine or in warm compost heaps. The range from powder blue to light orange in color and we are currently working on a white variation. They have waxy grains on their exoskeleton that makes them look like they are covered in a soft powder.
| Food | Fish flakes, alfalfa grass, dried leaves, brewers yeast and fruit and vegetable slices are happily eaten by Porcellionides Pruinosus. Sprinkle some Brewer’s yeast in a corner and mist it. The Isopods will eat that fungus. Remove any food items that mold other than the fungus from Brewer’s Yeast. |
| Temp Requirements | They like it warm. 75 to 85 degrees will keep them breeding for you. |
| Enclosure | Any container with slick sides. A glass aquarium, plastic bin or a shoe box with a lid are great containers to start with. Drill holes in any container that has a lid. Airflow is important. |
| Breeding | They will breed quickly and readily and will often breed prior to reaching full size. |
| Ease of Care | Easy |
| Substrate | Coconut Coir Bedding, Peat moss or sterilized leaf litter works well. |
| Humidity | Humid |
| Size | They get to be about a quarter in long. |
| Place of Origin | Mediterranean. |
| Identifying Characteristics | Elongated, thin body with a powdery coating in blue or orange. The blue variation is often confused with Flowery Blue Isopods. |
Porcellio Scaber
Rough Isopods, known by their Latin name, Porcellio scaber, are very easy to grow, house and care for. They can take wild extremes in temps and I have raised them in dry and very wet conditions without any interruption in growth and breeding.
Porcellio scabers are a great Isopod for beginners and also for experienced keepers. The beginner can raise Scabers to learn from, while the experienced keeper can experiment with different morph combinations. Over the years some very beautiful color variations have been created from pure white with white eyes to orange dalmations, and several other types in between.
We raise thousands of Rough Isopods and we have found that they especially love Pecan leaves, Alfalfa hay and pellets, fish flakes and brewers yeast. If you have all of those, you will be a hit with your Isopods. They will literally eat out of your hands.
Base Care Info:
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We are glad you are here. It gets lonely just talking to worms, crickets and fruit flies all day. Please engage with me, ask me a question or post a comment. Check out our forum and our directory. If you need worms, roaches or any type of feeder insects, please try Wormman.com
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