i have had my dubia about 2 months now and there doing great tons of babies. i just wanted to tell everyone what i found out this week. 2 times a week i always put apples and oranges in the roach bin also when i put the fresh fruits in i usually try some other type of fruit or vegetable this week i tryed cucumber i dont know if anyone has tryed this or not but just so everyone knows they love them in 1 day they demolished half of what i put in.
i just wanted to make this is thread so other people can post there experiences with what works and what doesnt.
Yes! I usually get excess Cucumbers and Squash that my friend grows in his garden. They plow through that stuff and it saves me a ton of money for the month or so he harvests them!
I throw in the stems of the collard and mustard greens that I feed the Dragons, that way the Dubia are getting the same fabulous vitamins! I also add raw yams, oranges, apple...
They love bananas and mangos, I let them have any that get too ripe for me to eat. Most all fruits and veggies are eaten well but don't offer coconut, they might eat some but it makes them smell really bad.
Well, I've been trying things I would normally place in my compost bin, but nothing actually already rotting. Two nights ago, I added just a little and it was gone the next morning. Last night I added maybe a couple tablespoons, and I saw the smaller nymphs burrowing in it and again it was completely gone this morning. What is this dubia delight? Coffee grinds. Also, the roaches also seem much more alert.
All coffee has caffeine in it. Decaf has about a tenth to a fifth of the amount of caffeine as a regular cup, depending on the brand. The University of Florida did a study. A regular cup runs about 85 milligrams of caffeine. A decaf cup runs about 8.9 to 13.6 milligrams of caffeine. Grounds are not diluted in the least, so they'll run a lot more than that. Green tea also has caffeine. It's made from the same leaves as black teas, the processing is different so the caffeine is lessened, but still present. Rooibos is made from a different tea leaf, which has no caffeine, and herbal teas aren't actually teas, because tea leaves aren't present. They have no caffeine. Um. Guessing a little TMI.
Did the roaches seriously seem more alert after eating coffee grounds? I'm wondering: If keeping them warmer ramps up their metabolism and causes them to breed more frequently, then if the caffeine ramped their metabolism up a bit more, would they breed more frequently (or just faster each time, much to the disappointment of the female dubias, leading to dubia divorce, colony evictions, and sleeping with their dubia wife's sister ). Honestly, though, Ian, Marcus, anybody tried it?
I feed my colony dog food/oats/fish food all mixed together. I also give a half of an orange. I threw in a few baby carrots for the hecck of it the other day and the dubia's seemed to relish them.
This is to answer some of the questions about the coffee. It was regular coffee. I don't know if alert is the best word to describe roaches, but it was chosen because of the obvious connotations with coffee. Let's say they have been more active and I have seen more of them while peeking through my screened window. I have not been touching the egg crates. When I had the lid off last night to add food, I saw more of them on the outside of the egg crates than I have seen since I put them in the enclosure; two of them were mating. My temperatures are fairly low, which I have been concerned about, so I was surprised to see them mating. I had the roaches for just over a week when I added the coffee grounds, so maybe the activity is just coincidence and they have finally settled in. But, they do like the coffee grounds.
Interesting... but.. what would the effect of the coffee residues in the bodies of the dubias be on your reptiles ?
Might wanna rethink feeding those current generations , you can use those however as a test, say for a period of 3 months, graphing reproduction rates, mortality rates, and at the end, we might see how to arrange a test to see what the chemical changes were in the bodies themselves...
Use other roaches not exposed to the coffee grounds as feeders.. Okay?
Janie
I'm with Janie on this one. Remember, what you feed to your feeders is ingested by your dragon so you want to make sure that the most nutritious choices are used for the feeders. Coffee residue would really not be a good thing for you dragons to be eating.