Life cycle of a mealworm

You can tell my non-affinity with science from the one measly post on it since I started blogging. Well, I now have another! Yay!

Andre has been learning life cycles for science as part of the p3 syllabus. He has been taught that some insects have a four-stage life cycle as depicted here:


To make the lesson come alive, his teacher gave each of her students two mealworms to bring home (below). When I first saw them, I said, "Eeeeee! Don't put them near me!" Sorry, my bug phobia always takes precedence. To compensate for my open disgust, I decided to dutifully note down the dates when the mealworms metamorphasise. He brought them home on 20 April. Obviously this is not the egg stage, so they're already at the creepy larva stage.

One week later on 27 April, Andre peered at the container in astonishment - there seemed to be THREE mealworms instead of two. Nope, they didn't clone themselves, one was just the skin. The mealworms were moulting.

Then for over a month, the mealworms did nothing but eat. We fed them bread, mostly. They ate steadily, shed their skins several times and by the end of May, finally one of them went into the pupa stage. It's the lighter coloured, shrivelled looking one. You can see the remnant of the skin it had shed next to it.

And finally, on 5 June, Andre let out a shriek when he went to check on his mealworms. One of them had become an adult (mealworm beetle). By the way, it's orange because Andre insisted on feeding it carrots.


Eeeeeeeeeeee.... it's uglier than ever. Plus now, it can fly *shudder*. I've suggested to Andre that we feed it to his carnivorous hamster but he insists he needs to bring it back to his teacher. In the name of science, I'll tolerate that bug in my home for the rest of the school holidays but I'm putting my foot down if the teacher gives him a cockroach next.