OP already knows how much he needs a day
BeardieT":2570punx said:
The 13 we have go through about 250 crickets plus greens a day and it costs about $20 a day.
Breeding dragons isnt very profitable. Not unless you are breeding high end morphs that you can look at selling for a couple hundred + each.
It's a fun thing to do, but it's part of the reason many breeders dont last. It's hard to be profitable.
Even if you had bug colonies that were large enough to sustain a large scale breeding practice, youd probably make more money selling the insects than you would feeding them to your dragons and selling the dragons.
Not to discourage you, but if you look at the numbers that's simply how it goes.
To answer your question on how breeders do it, most have wholesale accounts with insect farms. Crickets and mealworms are staples for most breeders as they are the cheapest. I know kidsanddragons gets around 15k crickets per week.
I dont know any who actively feed dubias. Some might occasionally just to say they do, but dubias are too expensive, and like mentioned, if they had a colony there would be more profit in selling the dubia as opposed to feeding them.
Oh, and bulk bsfl get used occasionally. But you really need to buy bulk quantities of everything to keep your cost low.
-Brandon