May start a roach colony... need some advice

[Kloster]

I got a beardie now. Shes a little girl 6'' head to tail.

Because of her im considering starting a b. dubia colony.

I have her and 3 Ts, well 4 with my rosie but she rarely eats (ughh fasting periods...).

Do you guys think its gonna be too many roaches for 5 little critters? I dont want 1000+ roaches in a bin and then having them overpopulate and all the cleaning and feeding and crystals and all that just to feed my 5 pets. Id obviously understand if there was 3+ Beardies but my tarantulas only eat 1-2 crickets a week unless I power-feed (1 day 1 crick 1 day no crick and so on).

In any case, I guess the real question is: how can I keep the population down once I have a "self-refilling" colony? What size would such colony be?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Arcais]

I'm still working on getting mine going, but the female are suppose to produce about 20 to 30 babies a month. My small beardies that are only a few month old would wipe that out in a day easily.

For male to female ratio, I'm heard 1 to 3 to as low as 1 to 10. Basically, you don't need that main males and they end up as food.

You can kind of do the math to see what you need. I think I need at least 30 to 40 producing females to even get enough for the two small ones.

If your population explodes, you can always sell them here :mrgreen:

 

[Doesj]

I'm considering the same thing, but just for one beardie and maybe one wall gecko...

I might even start before I get my beardie, that way I can start feeding from my colony immidiately.

My best guess was to feed the beardie adult females if your colony is growing too fast...

The main problem would be too many adults with a beardie which isn't big enough to eat them.

 

[clear]

What you can do is once you find the perfect median where you dont have to many and you dont have to few you can start removing the extra males and females.

 

[Kloster]

The main problem would be too many adults with a beardie which isn't big enough to eat them.

Thats exactly what worries me. Im terrified of insects but I guess ill have to brave it out and take out the adult roaches every now and then.

 

[clear]

Dont let that worry you, figure out how many roaches you need a month and assume that 1 adult female has about 20 babies per month. Keep roughly that many adult females constantly and a 1:5 ratio of males to females. If you are finding that you are producing to many babies, remove some of the adults.

 

[Kloster]

Dont let that worry you, figure out how many roaches you need a month and assume that 1 adult female has about 20 babies per month. Keep roughly that many adult females constantly and a 1:5 ratio of males to females. If you are finding that you are producing to many babies, remove some of the adults.

Makes sense, im gonna buy 200 nymphs now.
Thanks for all the input.