Confused red flour beetle colony question!

[Arthropod Hunter]

Hello guys , my friend gave me this colony of flour beetles all adults and after a few months i had so many of them and were all fine . but now it has many mites in it and i dont want to throw them away can anyone help me???? i have many flour beetle and larvaes in there and the mites dont seem to kill the beetles and larvaes, should i leave them together or no? pls help meeeeeee!

[Mentat]

Once contaminated with mites; there is no way to separate beetles from mites . If used for feeding darts and mites start reproducing in their enclosure, it can stress and eventually cause health issues to frogs .

[Arthropod Hunter]

oh no ! so what should i do??

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[JeffreH]

I'm not really sure if this would work, but I've seen it done for removing mites from Malagasy hissing roaches... You could try setting up a new container for the adult beetles with fresh food medium, then individually take each beetle and run it under a burst of water from a sink or something. Hold the beetle and let the water push over it for several seconds, dry the beetle by dabbing it on paper towel, then place it into the new container.

The hope is that the stream of water will remove any mites that are on the beetles. Then by placing them into fresh media, you won't have re-colonization of mites... hopefully.

Or, you could get a new flour beetle culture, and cull this one. lol