How much per month for bsfl and dubia?

CooperMountainSchool":3pmiy5yc said:

My son (age 9) and I are new to Bearded Dragons and have already gleaned a lot of useful info from your forums. Thank you for this website!

I am a bit swamped in information about feeding this sweet animal. The specialty store told us she's 7 months old. She seems a bit skinnier than the pictures I'm seeing here- she does not have that round belly shape at all yet.

We do not want to deal with crickets unless it's truly necessary for her health. So here are my questions:

If we feed her the recommended staple veggies/fruits from the list at Beautiful Dragons' site, can I just give her BSFL and Dubia as her protein staples?

<<<< BSFL and roaches are fine as staple live feeder insects.
<<< I highly recommend silkworms as a staple feeder insect too .... she's big enough to cope with silkworms up to 2 inches long.
<<< at 7 months old -- 2 meals of live insects per day , as many as she wants per meal.
<<< offer salad fresh daily (but don't be too worried if your hatchling ignores the green stuff and the veggies , gut load the roaches with left overs - she'll then get them without knowing.


The cost of feeding her is considerably more than I had realized because of the Dubia we've been buying. In our part of Beaverton Oregon, they are hard to find and when you do find them, they're about $8 for twelve medium insects (less than 1"). She could easily eat that many every day and she's not even fully grown! (Though I do understand that at maturity she'll need a few less per day.) Maintaining a colony ourselves sounds complicated- the main store nearest us just had their entire Dubia colony die, and they're "experts".
<<< most of us never buy our feeders from petshops (too darned expensive and quality never real flash) , we buy our feeder insects online in bulk.
Trick is to buy the size that will about the right size for the hatchling for 2 -4 weeks and order maybe 1.5x more than you estimate you'll actually use.
In my most recent case when Peppa and Toothless were about 7 months old , I was buying 1/4 size crickets 800 at a time by mail order , by the time two - three weeks was done the crickets had grown to 1/3 - 1/2 size and were still OK to use..

I just ordered some BSFL from Flukers, which seems like it may work out to be cheaper. Is there a difference in the names for these? Are they also called Phoenix worms? Is it cost-effective to have them delivered once a month? Or do we need to raise these also (sigh)?

I buy my BSFL every two weeks ( I'm feeding 20 - 30 per day to my 30g adult water skink ). The pupae are likely to start becoming flies past 3 weeks in the tub.



Thanks!

Click to expand...