Crickets are *almost* dead

Ok, so I've been ordering 1,000 medium sized crickets at a time for my beardie. I'm keeping the crickets in a cricket keeper, the exact one shown below.

http://www.petsmart.com/food-care/f...4-WyN?_t=pfm=search&SearchTerm=Kricket+Keeper

My problem is that I received my crickets yesterday. I put them into the cricket keeper right away and also put in some food for them - Flukers orange cubes and also some Flukers quencher (water). The next morning when I went to get the crickets they weren't moving. At first I thought they were all dead. I shook the keeper a bit and then noticed that they all (for the most part) started moving their legs and stuff, but they weren't very active. So they're still alive (for now) but I'm not exactly sure what is causing them to be all lethargic. My only guess is that I'm putting too many crickets into the size of container that I have. What are your thoughts on it?

Those are decent for temporary housing but not enough room for 1000 crickets. For 1000 I used a 20g tank with a mesh lid. I put a bunch of cardboard tubes in for their housing on one side and put dry grain food and plain water gel on the other for their food. They'd also get bits of scrap veges. I don't like using the orange cubes because they seem to cause problems for their molting process which is no good in the long term. I also found that keeping them on a shallow bed of wood shavings (like for a hamster) made it a bit easier to clean and kept the smell down a little bit. Another thought is that perhaps the temperatures are too low. Are you keeping them in an area that gets below about 70 degrees or so? They seem to thrive in temps above 70 based on my observation.

Thanks Cooper! I was keeping the cricket keeper on the floor in my pantry. It's probably around 68-70 degrees. May have been a tad too cold for them in addition to not having the space needed. I'll have to see about getting a 20 gallon tank to house them in. Thank you for all the great advice, I'm obviously new to all of this

If you can't get your hands on a cheap 20g tank, you can also use a large rubbermaid tote bin for them and just cut a hole in the top and cover it with mesh for ventilation.

Awesome! Great idea. I may just do that instead. Thanks once again. Have a great weekend!