Hi,
I started my 6 1/2 month old on Phoenix worms little over a month ago. He had been on small small superworms and crickets until then. I've read and been told by the company that sells the Phoenix worms that the substrate is not harmful to the beardie. I take them out one by one and tap the tongs on the side of the container and put them in his small round ceramic dish ($2.99 at Petco, it's just a about 2 1/2-3 inches across and the worms can't crawl out) - it needs to have straight sides. Once I put as many as I want in the dish, I lift the dish and bang the bottom of the dish 3 or 4 times on the table and believe it or not, most of the material comes off, settles to the bottom in the dish and they can crawl around about 85% clean. The only other option is to put them into a small mesh strainer and rinse them with some water. I choose not to do that each day and haven't seen anything bad come of it.
My beardie is hungriest in the morning so he's ready to eat about 30-50 medium worms in one 5-10 min sitting so leaving them there is not much of a worry in the morning. Since young beardies should eat 2x a day, we give him a smaller serving late afternoon (he doesn't want nearly as many as he does in the morning). At that point, I do leave them there and go back and check in a while, if they are not gone, I put them back because it means he's just not interested. The rule of thumb on the discussion boards is give them as many as they can eat in 10-15 and that works well in the morning for me..but not so much with his smaller afternoon "snack".
As far as calcium, one of the selling points of the Phoenix Worms is the calcium in them so as soon as I started with those, I stopped dusting w/calcium (but you should continue to dust with a multivitamin 2x a week 1x a day). Now I'm still learning the ins and outs of my beardie, but I have to tell you that about a week and half ago I started seeing big pieces and sometimes whole undigested worms in his poo. Had never happened before...responses on this forum told me that is not uncommon for Phoenix worms because they don't always chew them well and not to worry. It bothered me, though, because why would it just have started one day out of the blue when he'd be on them for a couple weeks at that point? My temps and lighting were good so it wasn't that...I'm trying something...2 days ago I started dusting the morning worms with some calcium, not too heavy. It occurred to me that maybe for mine, the calcium in the worms wasn't enough for him and it was affecting his disgestion. I'm going to give it a week and see if his poos go back to the way they were - with no undigested worms! If it works, I'll let you know and you can decide for yourself if it happens to yours.
Hoped this helped a little
Jennifer
