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Agar for mealworms
Hi,
I just wanted to share here how we make our agar as wet feed source for large experiments with mealworms. Sometimes we need about 20L a day so most of the labscale methods did not work for us.
First round:
We used a big cooking pot on an electrical fire, works well but this is very slow and prone to boiling over or burning or getting big lumps of agar.
Second round:
We now bought a big teakettle (e.g. Waterkoker Met Digitaal Display | 353x345x(h)598mm (xxlhoreca.com) and this works quite a bit better. The water can cook without looking at it or stirring it so we do not lose any time anymore. After that we pour it into a big measuring cup with agar (25g/L) while stirring. We can’t do 10 liter in a single batch anymore because it cools down to fast, but making 2 liter batches goes very fast now.
How are you doing it? Are there ways to improve on our method?
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2 Replies
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Nice approach! I never cooked so much agar at once like this (top was 3L in one batch), but I wondered, 25 g/L works well? I imagine it is very easy to cut it because it is very very solid, right? We used 7g/L and it was already sort of easy to cut into pieces and provide to the larvae.
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Hi Iva,
The agar is indeed very solid, but the main reason why I use 25g/L we use is to avoid leakage in the wheat bran an reduced dehydratation. When we tried 7 g (much cheaper) it did not go very well.
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