Flesh eating beetles!!

Well, I broke down and bought me some flesh eating beetles!!!

To be specific they are dermestid beetles and they are commonly used to clean the skulls of animals for European style mounts. They sound pretty scary, but they pretty much can only eat the flesh when it is drying and decomposing. You have to skin the animals head in order for them to feed on it. The biggest danger they pose if they get loose is that they might try to eat any leather that is around the house!

Anyway, I ordered some beetles online from a guy in Kodiak, Alaska of all places. I guess they must have the perfect climate for growing these beetles, because he sells a lot of them and is about the cheapest place that I found and came highly recommended on top of that.

Here's his website - http://www.bonesandbugs.com/

The beetles arrived today and thankfully the box was intact and they only took 5 days to get here in relatively mild temperatures. The beetles were packaged in a cottage cheese cartoon inside the box and appeared to have made the trip in good shape.

Here's the box that they arrived in.

If you look closely he punched very small holes in the lid so the bugs could get some air, but they were small enough that none of them were able to get out. Included with the beetles was a very nice 4 page write up on how to care for the bugs once they arrived as well as how to use the bugs to clean skulls.
There are supposed to be 1,000 total bugs in the cartoon. I didn't try to count them. There are adult beetles as well as larvae that look like little worms. In the instructions it states that the fluffy stuff the beetles are packaged in is called frass. It is made up of digested flesh, chewed up Styrofoam (that's what they bed in), and shed skin from the larvae when they molt. Sounds yummy and smells worse!
Here's where I'm setting them up for now. Hopefully they won't be able to climb the sides of the tub very well, but I'm not 100% sure about that yet. The net is more to keep other insects out than it is to keep the beetles in. The shredded paper is for bedding material and the black plastic dish is where I'm going to put the skulls for now. I may switch to something else though. The idea behind the plastic dish is in case teeth fall out of the skull when they are cleaning it, this way I won't have to be digging around in the "frass" looking for a tooth. Also this will keep any wet or damp things out of the bedding and prevent any chance of mold.
Here's when I dumped the beetles in. There were a lot of them that's for sure. I should have taken a little video clip because pretty much everything was moving. You could hear them rustling around in the paper.
I added some wet paper towels for them to drink from and some ham to get them started. I don't want to start them on a skull right away because all my skulls have been outside and everything I've read says about the worst thing you can do is introduce fly larvae into the colony. I don't think any flies are out right now to lay eggs in the skulls, but I'm going to put the skulls in the freezer for 24 hours before feeding them to the beetles to kill any fly eggs just in case.
Here's the plastic tote with the netting over the top. Hopefully it will do a good job of keeping the beetles in and keeping any other bugs out.
I'll probably post some updates on the first few skulls that I clean. I tried the boil and scrub method and just didn't seem to be able to get the hang of it. Hopefully this will work out, if not I guess I'll have to get better at the boil and scrub method.

Right now the beetles are in the garage. They need a pretty narrow temperature range from about 60 to 80 degrees to get the best results. I can get fairly close to that in the garage, but I'm not sure if Cathy is going to let me keep them in there long term. If they start to stink, I'll probably have to move them out to the barn and I'm not sure they will make it through the summer out there. I've got 3 pig skulls, 3 deer skulls a bobcat skull and a coyote skull that I would like to get cleaned and even if that's all that I get done before the colony dies off I will be way ahead of what it would have cost to have someone else clean the skulls for me.

It will be interesting to see how it works out.

That's it for now.

Nathan