Description

Bean Weevil Starter Culture for Dart Frogs – 500cc Livefood Culture

Looking for another easy livefood to add to your dart frogs’ diet? Our 500cc Bean Weevil Starter Culture gives you everything you need to begin establishing your own ongoing colony of these tiny feeder insects at home.

Each starter contains a mixture of adult bean weevils and developing larvae within the beans. This means you’re not simply buying a pot of adult insects to feed once – you’re receiving an active culture at different stages of its life cycle, ready to continue developing and reproducing.

Bean weevils are incredibly simple to maintain, take up very little space and can become a useful supplementary feeder alongside your normal fruit fly cultures and other appropriately sized livefoods.

Why Feed Bean Weevils to Dart Frogs?

Fruit flies remain the practical staple feeder for most captive dart frogs, but that doesn’t mean they need to be the only thing on the menu.

In the wild, dart frogs encounter a huge variety of tiny invertebrate prey. We cannot perfectly recreate that diversity in captivity, but introducing additional appropriately sized feeders can provide dietary variety, different feeding opportunities and enrichment through natural hunting behaviour.

Bean weevils are particularly useful because they are:

• Small, active feeder insects suitable for many dart frogs.
• Extremely easy to culture at home.
• An excellent way to increase feeder variety alongside fruit flies and other micro-feeders.
• Simple to harvest as adults emerge from the beans.
• Suitable for light dusting with an appropriate vitamin and mineral supplement before feeding.
• Very low maintenance compared with many livefood cultures.
• Capable of producing an ongoing supply from a relatively small starter culture.

If you’re interested in building a broader feeding regime, have a read through our Dart Frog Feeding Guide, which covers feeder choice, feeding frequency and supplementation in considerably more detail.

What’s in Your 500cc Bean Weevil Starter Culture?

Each culture is supplied in an approximately 500cc tub and contains a mixture of adult bean weevils together with beans containing developing life stages.

That’s important because a healthy culture isn’t judged simply by the number of adult beetles you can see when the lid is opened. Much of the next generation is developing inside the beans themselves.

• 1 × approximately 500cc Bean Weevil Starter Culture
• Adult bean weevils
• Beans containing developing larvae
• An active culture ready to continue developing
• Suitable for feeding from and establishing further cultures

Bean Weevils Are Exceptionally Easy to Culture

This is probably their biggest advantage.

You don’t need to prepare wet media, blend complicated ingredients or regularly replace food. Bean weevils reproduce using dry beans, with the developing larvae growing safely inside the beans before emerging as adults.

Once your culture is established, those adults reproduce and the cycle begins again.

How to Start Your Own Bean Weevil Culture

1. Prepare a clean, dry and appropriately ventilated container.
2. Add suitable clean, dry beans.
3. Add some of your Frogfather starter culture.
4. Keep the culture dry and at a suitable warm room temperature.
5. Allow the adults to reproduce and the next generation to develop within the beans.
6. Harvest emerging adults as required for feeding.
7. Periodically use adults and culture beans to establish a fresh backup culture.

That’s essentially it.

Given time, a relatively small starter can develop into a surprisingly productive colony with very little day-to-day maintenance.

See What a Mature Bean Weevil Culture Looks Like

The image below shows one of our own larger bean weevil cultures after approximately three months of establishment.

It provides a good demonstration of just how productive these cultures can become once several generations are developing and emerging at the same time.

Feeding Bean Weevils to Dart Frogs

We recommend bean weevils as a supplementary feeder rather than a replacement for a properly managed staple diet.

Fruit flies are a practical staple feeder in many captive dart frog collections. Bean weevils simply give you another appropriately sized prey item to introduce periodically, increasing variety and encouraging your frogs to hunt something a little different.

You can browse our complete dart frog livefood range here.

For smaller frogs and froglets, springtails are another extremely useful micro-feeder and can provide continuous natural foraging opportunities within a well-established bioactive vivarium.

Don’t Forget Supplementation

Feeder variety and nutritional completeness are not the same thing. Even when several different livefoods are offered, an appropriate supplementation routine remains an important part of captive dart frog husbandry.

Adult bean weevils can be lightly dusted immediately before feeding in much the same way as other suitable feeder insects.

At Frogfather we use our All-In-One Vitamin & Mineral Dust for Feeder Insects, which we use as our routine single-powder supplementation system. The appropriate supplementation schedule varies with species, life stage, feeder type and the wider husbandry system.

Why Keep More Than One Culture?

Once your starter is producing well, we recommend using it to establish a second culture rather than relying permanently on a single tub.

This creates a simple rolling system. If one culture naturally slows down, becomes contaminated or is accidentally allowed to run down, you still have another colony developing.

The same principle applies to most home-produced livefood. Maintaining cultures at slightly different stages provides a much more reliable supply than depending on one exceptionally productive container.

A Brilliantly Simple Supplementary Dart Frog Livefood

If you already keep dart frogs and culture fruit flies, bean weevils are one of the easiest ways to add another feeder to your livefood routine.

They require very little space, very little maintenance and no complicated culture medium. Start with our 500cc mixed-stage culture, add dry beans and give the colony time to establish – you can then begin producing your own ongoing supply at home.

For more information about building a balanced feeding routine, see our Complete Guide to Feeding Dart Frogs.

Please note: Live cultures naturally vary throughout their reproductive cycle. The number of visible adults in your starter culture will therefore vary. Beans within the culture may contain developing larvae even when relatively few adult weevils are visible.

Evidence & further reading

• Latney & Clayton – amphibian nutrition and common feeder insects
• Livingston et al. – nutrient supplementation, dusting and gut-loading
• Ferrie et al. – Nutrition and Health in Amphibian Husbandry