This Project aims to develop a farm for growing insects cheaply, easily and safely for human consumption. Eventually we will want to experiment with many different species but for now the focus has been on Mealworms.
Much inspiration and thanks to the OpenBugFarm people over at TinyFarms!
The first colonies were trials with mealworms (Kreca and local petshop) and superworms (local petshop). We managed to get some mealworms to complete a full life cycle but the yield was dismal. We took what we learnt and tried to do it on a larger scale with the second colony.
For the Second colony we started with 1 kg of live mealworms supplied by Kreca. This was done because of the bad yield of the first colony. The purpose of the second colony was to gain experince with the farming, give students (and supervisors!) of the makercourse a chance to familiarize themselves with the species and to follow the life cycle as well as to do some experiments to find out more about these critters.
- Building the farm
- Cannibalism experiment
- Conditioning (profielwekstuk)
Part of the project is warming people to the idea of eating insects, this is done through presentations, workshops and tastings.
- Introductory workshop (mealworm tacos)
- Building a mealworm farm with DJO
- 31C3 (mealworm cookies)
- Making a mealworm pate analog
- No-bake chocolate peanutbutter oatmeal mealworm cookies
- White chocolate waxmoth larvae cookies
- Mealworm pate