TAMING AND FEEDING BIRDS 359 



The best insect food for all soft-billed birds is meal 

 worms, and every child that wishes to help young birds in 

 the way suggested or care for any wounded bird that may 

 fall in his way should learn how to rear them and keep a 

 supply on hand. They are also excellent food for winter 

 birds and for robins and bluebirds and many others that 

 come early in the spring. We do not always have the 

 time to collect insects in sufficient quantity, but we can 

 always have a supply of meal worms if we once learn how 

 to rear them. 



The meal worm is the larva of a black beetle which 

 can be found from May to October about granaries, mills, 

 where feed is kept in stables, in the dust of haylofts, in 

 pigeon lofts, and meal chests. The eggs are laid in these 

 places and when hatched and fully grown the larvae are 

 smooth yellow, Tenebrio niolitor, or blackish, T. obscicriis, 

 "worms," about an inch in length. While commonly 

 looked upon as pests, for feeding birds they are well-nigh 

 indispensable. The writer has paid twenty-five cents a 

 dozen for them to feed mocking birds, and the market price 

 by the wholesale is ^1.50 per thousand. If we know how 

 to use them, the worms in a meal chest may thus be worth 

 many times the value of the meal, chest and all. 



Directions in the bird books for raising meal worms are 

 quite misleading, and in order to go to work intelligently we 

 must learn the life story from egg to egg. The first fact to 

 learn is that the insect is single brooded, i.e., it requires an 

 entire season to complete its growth. The beetles may be 

 found laying eggs from May until freezing weather in 

 the fall. The early eggs will produce larvae that are full- 

 grown by September or October of the same season, and 



