breeding crickets

[coco5]

HOW :?: :?: :?: I have tryed but I can't. And they are SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO expensive. :x

 

[romanfj]

Don't do it! Breed crickets, I mean. I did it very successfully for a year, with never less than 5000 on hand at a time, and they stink. Quite literally!

They also cannibalize their young, so they compete for your dragon's food.

I can offer another half-dozen reasons why they're a pain, but I won't. I encourage you to try tropical roaches, dubias specifically. I didn't want to and my wife wouldn't let me for the longest time, but I finally did and I'll never go back.

I just answered a thread yesterday viewtopic.php?f=76&t=124014
Please check it out and check out the care instructions at http://www.theroachranch.com as well.

There are many other species which are also useful as food and they all take the same care requirements. Some climb better than dubia, some are smaller or larger, etc.

Frank

 

[ajkry2]

http://skylab.org/~chugga/cricket/

 

[NickBarta]

Depending on how many animals you have, buying 500 or 1,000 via the internet can be cost effective. On 1,000 from LLL Reptiles you will pay about 2 cents each, which includes shipping ($20.00). I always buy 1/4-1/2 inch so they aren't adults for 3-4 weeks, it just means you will feed lots more than if they were adult.

At 10 cents each at a pet store, you would get 200 instead of 1,000!

Stink is an issue, and this is the best way to deal wih it. The bottom of my cricket container is a metal hardware cloth that is hot glued in place. The holes are too big, so i hotglue a plastic gridded cloth you get at Joanne's Fabrics to make a finer grid, so the 1/4 inch cricket can't get through, but the frass (poop) does.
This entire container sits on top of another container, so I empty the bottom container out without having to remove all he egg crates, crickets, food and water cubes.

Another stink trick is to buy one of the odor sticks that you recharge in the sun, they actually work pretty well.

All that being said, crickets do stink, Dubias are the way to go.....

Nick Barta

 

[romanfj]

Another way to help keep down the stink is to control their diet. I found that if I fed mine high-quality (holistic) dog food, apples, carrot and collard greens ONLY, the odor stayed down.

Keeping the humidity down in the adult cricket enclosure, say no more than about 50% also seems to help. The eggs, of course, need to be removed fairly quickly (I did every 2 days) and put into a higher humidity environment for incubation.

Most people tell me they clean the cricket bin every 1-2 weeks at most. I could go 4-5 weeks with this diet/humidity before I could smell them. Maybe I was just lucky

Nick,
Nice idea on the false cage bottom! I couldn't think of anythng small enough to keep the little crickets in and still let the frass out.

Frank

 

[NickBarta]

Frank,

the hardware cloth gives you the stregth, the plastic grid gives you the right sized holes to keep the little buggers in!

I have been told if you add mint to the diet they don' smell as bad... Havn't tried it,but smelled a closet with 25,000 crix, and it was Fabreeze fresh!

Nick Barta