Baby Beardie feeder Q's

[Sadona]

So, I have about everything figured out for a Beardie that I hope to get on the 21st...BUT I am still stuck on one thing: feeders.
Crix seem to be the easiest route for me. My mother refuses to let me order them in bulk, or get Dubias because I still live with her still. I would breed Dubias if I could, but the temps arn't warm enough around here for that anyways. Are their any other options, or I am out of luck?
I have to admit, I am intimidated by the large amount of crixs I hear that people feed their beardies. I planned on feeding about 15 everyday...but GEEZ, 50-100?! I really don't think I will have money for anything else but crix! Anybody have any luck with feeding a smaller amount?
If I were to feed 15 everyday, could I use something like Nature Zones Bearded Dragon Bites food to make up for the lack of crix?

Agh, I'm sorry guys...I'm just really trying to make this work for both me and my future bearded dragon.

 

[zizzee]

Baby beardies can eat upto 60 small crickets so 15 is nowhere near enough! I don't know about replacing crickets with dragon food, it might be too big for babies (I've never used it myself). Crickets are easy to come by, I'd stick with them.

Here's a list of things they can eat, sorted by colour & nutritional value; hope this helps: http://www.beautifuldragons.503xtreme.com/Nutritionframeset.html

 

[romanfj]

While I haven't used beardie chowmyself, something to keep in mind is that digestion requires more water than any other biological process, and beardies don't take a lot of water in. Beardie chow is very dry. Over a lifetime, I would think relying on beardie chow could have a detrimental effect on the animal's kidneys; hence, I don't use it.

The food list on beautifuldragon.org is fantastic. The key to remember is that baby beardies eat 80% insects/20% veggies. Give them too much more in vegetables as babies and they don't have enough protein to grow. They also get diarrhea (you don't want to see THAT). As they mature, dragons GRADUALLY start eating more veggies and fewer bugs until, at full adulthood, they eat 80% veggies/20% bugs (yep, the exact opposite).

So, the bad news for your wallet is that you need a bunch of bugs and will continue to need them for a year or more. Good news is you CAN breed tropical roaches. Here are a few options for heating:
1. Stick them in a small room with a $15 forced air electric heater with variable thermostat from WalMart and close the door. I use my back porch for this. Others use their furnace room, mudroon, corner of the unfinished basement, even an OPEN closet with the heather just OUTSIDE of the closet, blowing hot air in. Just be sure not to get a heater with only Hi/Lo settings. Those equal frozen and cooked.
2. Place a heating pad under the roach bin. Be aware that most modern heating pads have a shutoff switch. When they reach a certain temp, they turn off AND DO NOT TURN BACK ON. I hear that Walgreens still sells heating pads that provide continuous heat, but you'd have to verify that yourself.
3. Try the same thing with an electric blanket. These provide continuous heat and I got one for $10 at Wal-Mart last week.
4. Use pipe heating cable from the hardware store. It's a flexible electric element that you can wrap around frozen pipes to thaw them out. Hook the tape up to a dimmer switch to control the amount of electricity going into the heating cable (and therefore how hot it gets). I got a lifetime supply for my snakes for about $30 at Menard's this weekend.

Be sure to remind your mom that these are tropical roaches. The word roach kept me breeding enough crickets for 15 dragons for a year because of my wife and it was miserable. They stink. Roaches don't.

Further, tropical roaches do not breed well below about 82 degrees. They can still produce a few babies below that temp, but they'll never infest your house at any human temperature. Additionally, they don't THRIVE without fruit in their diet. Further, unlike the dreaded German cockroach, they aren't able to live for months on virtually no food (such as animal dander or wallpaper paste, my 2 favorite examples). They need a steady supply of a diet that's balanced between high protein and plant matter.

Best news is a balanced diet can be as simple as kitten food with the weekly addition of 1 of any fruit (except citrus fruits other than oranges). Some people's dubia's eat the same greens your dragon will, which gutloads them. Mine won't, for some reason. The occasional carrot is also appreciated and mine go crazy for cantaloupe.

Roaches are a bit more expensive than crickets on a per bug basis, but your dragon is going to eat fewer roaches because they are bigger than crix. Check out my 2 favorite suppliers:

Marcus at http://www.afexotics.weebly.com and
Ian at http://www.theroachranch.com

Finally, roaches come in all sizes, from small enough to feed a hatchling dragon to big enough for an adult.

I hope this helps and I hope you don't get trapped into buying crickets. They are a pain to deal with compared to roaches.

Frank

 

[Sadona]

Geez, Frank...you have already talked me half-way into begging my mom to keep roaches lol.

I have a few questions though...if I did try to start a self-sustaining colony for 1 baby bearded dragon, how long would this take, and how would I go about doing it? How much nymphs does a baby need to eat a day? How many roaches would I have to buy to begin it? Would the roaches make enough babies for the beardie to eat in about...2-3 weeks?

I'm new to this concept...I don't know jack-squat about dubia care.

 

[romanfj]

Well, for care instructions regarding dubias, check out the Roach Ranch. Ian gives care instructions there, which are more specific. Basically, it's 85 degrees, the food I mentioned, water in the form of water gels and egg crates (to give them a place to hide from the light)inside a ventilated Rubbermaid tote.

If the beardie is a hatchling, it will probably eat about 10-15 newborn dubia nymphs/day. The number and size of nymphs goes up as the beardie grows.

If you buy adult roaches from Marcus or Ian, they will arrive pregnant, which means they will either have babies while in the mail or within 4 weeks of arrival. 1 mature dubia female gives birth to about 30 nymphs every 30 days. So, if you buy enough newborn nymphs to feed your beardie for about 3-4weeks and some adult breeding trios (1 male to 2 females - more males than that just eat your food and won't reproduce any faster), you should be set for baby dubia nymphs for the rest of your life.

However, you need those baby nymphs to grow with your dragon as his tastes lean toward bigger nymphs. It takes 5 months from date of birth for a dubia to be a full-sized adult. So, at 1 month, they're about 1/4 inch, 2 months 1/2 inch, 3 months 3/4 inch, 4 months 1 inch, 5 months adult.

This is where you need the information about how many adult dubias to start with to keep pace with your dragon's growth and is a tough question for me to answer becuase I didn't buy my beardies one at a time. However, Ian can tell you how many you'll need. And YES, you CAN trust him not to sell you twice as many as you need jus to make a buck. He's both honest and in this business for the long-term and is NOT going to cheat anyone. The beardie community is just too small for that kind of supplier to survive anyway.

Hope this gets you started!
Frank