Beetles For Sale
Buy a beetle and you usually buy a beetle. Buy a stag or flower beetle and what arrives is a fat white grub in a tub of dark crumbly substrate, and it will stay a grub for most of the time you own it. The adult is the short, spectacular end of a life spent mostly underground, eating wood.
That catches people out, because almost every care sheet online describes the adult. Our guide to keeping beetle larvae covers the part you will actually be doing: getting a larva through to emergence without losing it.
The substrate is the food
Fermented flake soil and kinshi are not bedding with feeding on the side. A beetle larva eats what it lives in, so these are the entire diet, and running out is the commonest way a grub is lost. Both are stocked year round even when the livestock is not.
Larvae are sold by instar
L1 is a freshly hatched grub: cheapest, longest wait, least margin for error. L3 is the final stage, closest to pupation, and the shortest route to an adult. Which suits you depends on whether you want the animal or the process.
Livestock moves in and out of stock with the breeding season. The dry goods do not, so if you are setting up ahead of a purchase you can get the substrate in first, which is the right order anyway.
Packed and posted in the UK.
