Foraging for mealworm tips??

[G8love4finches]

I have been feeding mealworms to my RH Parrot parents who are currently feeding 4 chicks...My question is: Is there a way to offer the mealworms, so the birds need to do some foraging to find them?....I currently drop about 5-6 worms in a dish, and then the birds come down and eat them, and then spend time looking for more around the bottom of the cage....I keep paper on the cage floor...I think I could keep the worms coming all day and they would never stop eating the worms to feed the babies......I thought of putting some oat bran in a larger dish and hope it takes them more time to find them, but I am unsure if the oat bran would be safe for them to eat.....I have seen the ones they drop crawling away, and am worried about some getting out of the dish....Any suggestions or experience with this would be greatly appreciated....

[Ian]

My green singers used to love meal worms and half of them would escape and end up on the cage floor. I had a substrate (like wood chips) which they would crawl amongst, the keen eyed birds will spot them and root them out. They wont do any harm.

[Sally]

I use hay in the bottom of my breeding cages, and when my Purple Grenadiers recently had babies, I started dumping the mealworms in the hay for the birds to forage for them. This worked very well for a while, but pretty soon, the male decided it was far easier to just sit on a perch and wait for me to dump them, rather than put forth the energy to search for them. Since I didn't see him looking for worms, I thought he must have eaten all of them, so I dumped more into the hay. Then one day I decided to clean out the hay, and I found literally hundreds of mini mealworms under the hay! I have gone back to using dishes. I believe BCamp puts his mealworms in a dish of bran, and so the birds can still forage, but it is controlled.

[B CAMP]

The bran works great just use a glass bowl about 1 1/2 and they don't crawl out