Dubia for 4

So I've read my fair share of dubia information over the interwebs, and I've decided to take on breeding. I've started to collect the materials necessary. I have what I'd like to call an average size Rubber Maid bin to house them, some food/water crystal dishes, lots of egg flats and paper towel rolls, and I'm currently waiting on my heat tape and thermostat to arrive so I can begin testing temps. Now to my actual question, the goal is to feed my 2 beardies, my monitor, and my buddies new leopard gecko. I've read that good Female:Male ratio is 3:1. That being said, how many adults of each sex should I buy? I want to breed enough to obviously feed the list plus maybe one or two more, but I also don't want to overdue/overwhelm myself with a million roaches my first go at this lol. I was thinking start with 6 adult females, 2 adult males, and maybe 500-1,000 mixed sizes up to sub adult or so? Sorry if this is too lengthy Thanks in advance for any help!

My colony is going to feed 2 bearded dragons and my 10 Leopard geckos (occasionally). Unless you feed off all your adults (and then nymphs) you will always have continuous supply. I started out with 15 adult females, 5 adult males, and around 500 random sized nymphs. That was the beginning of June and I've been letting them do their thing without taking from the colony since then. I have thrown another 50 or so nymphs into the colony that had gotten too big for my dragons to eat, but it has grown considerably since then. There are so many babies running around! I can honestly say that my number of adult males and females has definitely increased, there are at least 25-30 adults in there now and nearly 3x that many in nymphs that are close to being adults. So it can really explode on you fast. I plan on starting to use the colony in September, so they will have 3 months to establish themselves.

Remember to let the colony establish itself first before you start using it, ~3 months is a good amount of time. If you find your colony is getting too big you can always feed off some of the adults to keep the population down a bit. Hopefully your monitor or bearded dragons are big enough to take on that task! :lol:

Awesome! One of my beardies is big enough to tackle maybe sub adult's or whatever size 3/4 an inch is, my monitor on the other hand is used to eating medium frozen mice (We just got her as a rescue sort of situation and I'm trying to ween her off them) so she can knock back anyone who gets to big! I've already purchased 1000 smalls just to experiment and see if they would eat them. Not one of my animals had to blink twice before they devoured a few! Thanks for your input, I'll probably start with around 12-15 females and throw in about 500 or so mixed sizes.

EDIT: Another question, I know I should leave them alone for the most part during the first three months or so, so how often is a good time to change/add food and water so I don't disturb them? Once a week? I'll be using mostly roach chow and water crystals. I also wanna throw them our leftover veggie/fruit scraps but should I hold off on them until they're more established and I can clean uneaten food more often?

I have about 1500 Dubia now, in the last 5 or 6 weeks. I have 500 in one container I call the "Breeder" and 1000 in a smaller container I call the "Feeder".

I purchased the 1000 XXS nymphs so I dont disturb the breeder colony. The breeder has about 30F/10M. However once a week I notice a dead adult or two. I rarely see any dead smaller roaches. I check their food two-three times a week.

My baby bearded alone is eating about 30 nymphs a day (finally he is eating!) and my leopard gecko is eating about 6 pre-adults every other day.

I would think a monitor would eat an entire colony in one sitting?

Alright so I got all my supplies together for my roach home and set it up. Not sure of gallon size on the tote, I'll take pictures of the setup when I'm out of work. I wrapped it in 3 feet of flex watt heat tape and it seems to be working correctly, thermostat is a ReptiTherm 500 from ZooMed. I've had it running on full blast and the highest temps I've read inside the egg crates is 85*F using a temp gun and a zoomed temp gauge (the common yellow ones) and the thermostat on high. I wanna have everything correct for breeding before I buy them, and from what I've read this may be a little low? Thanks for any help in advance.

I apologize for not seeing your question earlier, for whatever reason I didn't get a notice about it. :?:

Did you wrap the flexwatt around the tote? Is it a plastic tote? I would just be careful to monitor that as I have heard of stories where something goes wrong with the flexwatt itself and can melt the plastic. I would feel safer just putting a strip down and setting the tote on the flexwatt itself, but that is me.

As for the temperature, I hear very differently from many people. Some say it needs to be 90 degrees, some say 100 degrees. I have been keeping mine around 90 and they are doing very well with that. For the colony, I use roach chow and veggie combo along with water crystals (to help out with humidity) and sliced oranges. I have a plastic lid I keep all the fresh food on that I check every day depending on the type of food that is in there. Squashes/melons seem to go bad fast so I try and take those out within 24 hrs, but the orange slices and carrots seem to last a bit longer. I've always fed mine this way and it hasn't impacted their breeding at all really.

EightFingers":2426w65p said:

However once a week I notice a dead adult or two. I rarely see any dead smaller roaches.

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In the beginning I noticed a few dead adults as well, since I started out with adults I was never sure how old they actually were (can you tell their age? :lol: ) so I chalked it up to old age. Since then I come across an occasional dead adult but have plenty more to make up for it.