@Enyalius11
Dubias are actually very easy to breed. Just give them heat and they pretty much will do the rest. You can google or youtube setups and stuff since its way too much to type out. As for buying a start kit, it boils down to 2 options. The speedy and expensive or the slow and cheap. Let me start by saying most of the kits can be bought very cheap. You can buy a 45 gallon Rubbermaid( I prefer Rubbermaid over sterilite since they have thinner bottoms making it easier to heat) for around $20 from Home Depot. You can get egg crates or cartons for dirt cheap too. Then the food dish and water dish, again just buy some small aluminum loaf baking tins from a grocery store. And finally the heater, I just use a UTH. That's about the most expensive part. But all together, that setup should run you maybe $50 dollars.
Now the roaches, as I said cheap and slow or expensive and fast. Cheap and slow involves just ordering a bunch of large nymphs and letting them grow. Generally if oyu buy the largest you can get(around 1+ inches), they should about a molt or 2 away from adulthood. Once they turn into adults then you need to do a count of males and females and go from there. Then you generally want to wait 1 generation(about 6 months) for those new adults babies to turn into adults. Then you should be good to feed out of it.
The fast and expensive way is to buy a bunch of adults and then say a mixed bunch of probably 500 and let them go around 2-3 months. Then you can probably start feeding out of it. As to how many you need, rule of thumb is 3x the amount your dragon eats in a month. So say your dragon eats 200 a month, you will want to be making around 600 babies a month. Each female has around 20ish babies a month. Personally I would check local craigslist or ebay. I picked up freshly molted adult females at $0.80 each from a guy locally who had 2 colonies. It makes it easy cause you can just meet him and get them, no need for shipping or the chance of death from shipping or cold weather. I did this to bolster my colony which is also a good idea every 6 months to 1 year imo to keep the genes fresh and flowing so you don't end up with inbred hillbilly roaches
Regardless of which direction you go, you can sell the xtras on craigslist or ebay or here or whatever. As for worms, I used to feed Harley phoenix worms when she was a very small baby. Butterworms and hornworms and silkworms all work too but hornworms grow very fast so unless you feed them fast, they will probably outgrow a very small dragon. Butterworms are good but unless you specifically order small ones, you will end up with 1+ inch ones in the mix which again is too big for a very small dragon. Silkworms are pretty much inbetween all that, they grow medium speed but seem like a lot of work to me with heat, need for sterile condtions, having to make the chow and everything. I just did phoenix worms and dubia roaches along with greens for Harley when she was very small. Now that she is a 16 inch lazy fat slug, I feed her greens, dubias, butterworms, hornworms, and as a treat, i'll buy large silkworms once in awhile. I have never fed her mealworms or superworms and doubt I ever will.
