Hello Everyone! Meet Leo

She was about 4-5 months before I got brave and bought a cup of 25. They were very small probably only 1/4 inch or slightly larger. I have (or I should now say HAD) an extreme fear of bugs. LMAO now I can tolerate the bugs. I can touch the worms and the BSFL (but she refuses those) and hand feed her but I still can’t touch the Dubia or crickets. Which makes cleaning out the Dubia cage hysterical for anyone to watch. Biggs is now almost 8 months and seems to be slowing down in her feedings. We were going through almost 1000 Dubia in 3 weeks.

oh man that's alot of food! The way i got myself used to picking up crickets was to use a plastic bag over my hand to trap them and pick them up. I have heavy hands so it makes it easier for my to grab them without smashing them, especially when they are running around in the cage!

Yes it does seem like a lot, but price wise cheaper. Where I live the crickets are 16 cents each and the Dubia price out roughly 10 cents each and they are much higher in protein. If you haven’t read it yet there is a thread on the feeders listing breaking down each feeder in their nutritional value. And they don’t make noise and they don’t smell. Biggs poop even smelled a lot less when I switched. And nope I can’t touch the dang crickets even with a bag. Whenever they would escape I got the vacuum out and sucked them up. :lol:

Did Leo poop yet? Whenever Biggs doesn’t go I let her run around the house and she usually goes, or give her a bath. Sometimes I only have to threaten her with a bath and she goes. :lol:

He did poop and he has pooped the last two days. He even let me hold him and he laid on my chest for about 15 minutes before he had enough and wanted back in his enclosure. He ate about 3 crickets this morning. 4 this afternoon and I was thinking about offering him some more if he seems interested. He started shedding skin off his knee even though I haven’t seen any pieces laying around.

I grew my dubia roach colony for a year and a half before I got Lyrica. Even in the beginning I was never afraid of them. Though it took a while to get used to them crawling on me, it was so ticklish! I like bugs but my mom hates them, especially roaches. I convinced her that these roaches aren't pest roaches but she still can't stand to even look at them for very long, even if they're small. I pick them up as if they're pieces of popcorn. One cool thing about dubias is that they don't bite. Or if they do, it doesn't hurt at all. One time I had my hand on one of the egg crates and it smelled like lettuce, which my dubias love, and I believe one of them started "chewing" on my finger. If you could call it chewing anyway. It felt like someone was taking their fingernail and lightly scratching my skin with it.

Also, it's good to know that Leo finally pooped. Sounds like he's pretty happy.

Welcome Leo! It sounds like you have a very good beardie slave in the training!

I have handled my new babies from the first day, just a few minutes at a time, and they became comfortable right away. My newest girl Penny was very traumatised from some bad situation, and was considered to be untameable, and even vicious! She was snuggling into my hand and sleeping there in a day. Just keep sessions short since they have short attention spans. It sounds like you are already on the way to having a sweet' snuggle baby. please keep posting so we can follow Leo and watch him grow!