Well a few years back, I made the great choice of purchasing a few hundred Dubia to start a colony. I will never regret that decision!
I'm hardly active on these forums, and honestly spend less and less time with my beardies, being in highschool is quite time consuming. I think I will be attempting to be more active in this community :shock: My Dubia colony was under sufferance from my neglect, after I dedicated a large amount of time to ensuring it was up and running properly. By this, I mean I would throw some food in every day and not much else.
Today, I had the fun task of ridding of the dead dubia carcasses, as I haven't cleaned or really done anything with the colony for a few months, closer to a year. I'm just going to estimate, but I'll say there was upwards of 200 dead adult males and females, . The egg cartons are near decimated, but I already placed an order for 75 online, (sadly they won't ship for a week as they are out of stock, and shipping looks as if it will take another 1-2 weeks ).
Now I think some of the die off was, well most of the die off was due to neglect, but also a huge part was overcrowding. I have them in a 29 gallon bin. I will probably be cleaning out the bin whenever the crates come.
After this wall of text and rant, my real question is how do people go about maintaining multiple colonies? As in one for feeders and one for breeders. Though my colony is not even half of what it was at one point in time, its still quite large (I think...). How often do you have to switch the feeder colony with the adults as the nymphs morph into adults and the adults die off? Do I need to continuously move adults over from the nymph bin to the adult bin? Does anyone know roughly how much time is added on with adding an additional bin for breeders?
I'm doing this for the chance to give away (With shipping costs )batches Dubia for people wanting to test out Dubia colony, as my two adults beardies eat only a few every few days, and I'm already investing time in maintaining the colony.
Thanks for reading, if you did.
I'm hardly active on these forums, and honestly spend less and less time with my beardies, being in highschool is quite time consuming. I think I will be attempting to be more active in this community :shock: My Dubia colony was under sufferance from my neglect, after I dedicated a large amount of time to ensuring it was up and running properly. By this, I mean I would throw some food in every day and not much else.
Today, I had the fun task of ridding of the dead dubia carcasses, as I haven't cleaned or really done anything with the colony for a few months, closer to a year. I'm just going to estimate, but I'll say there was upwards of 200 dead adult males and females, . The egg cartons are near decimated, but I already placed an order for 75 online, (sadly they won't ship for a week as they are out of stock, and shipping looks as if it will take another 1-2 weeks ).
Now I think some of the die off was, well most of the die off was due to neglect, but also a huge part was overcrowding. I have them in a 29 gallon bin. I will probably be cleaning out the bin whenever the crates come.
After this wall of text and rant, my real question is how do people go about maintaining multiple colonies? As in one for feeders and one for breeders. Though my colony is not even half of what it was at one point in time, its still quite large (I think...). How often do you have to switch the feeder colony with the adults as the nymphs morph into adults and the adults die off? Do I need to continuously move adults over from the nymph bin to the adult bin? Does anyone know roughly how much time is added on with adding an additional bin for breeders?
I'm doing this for the chance to give away (With shipping costs )batches Dubia for people wanting to test out Dubia colony, as my two adults beardies eat only a few every few days, and I'm already investing time in maintaining the colony.
Thanks for reading, if you did.