Not sure how to spell them, but are they safe for beardies to eat? They are super easy to raise (my hermits eat the babies). I am looking for some good staple feeders that I am not afraid of. I only have silk worms so far. I am raising meal worms but those are not staple. I am afraid of phoenix worm flies, hornworm moths, crickets and roaches though I offer crickets and roaches but my Beardie is rather picky. I won't raise those bugs though.
From what I've read they're slightly harder shelled than other feeders as they really aren't bugs but crustaceans. (SP?). I was looking into these for my dubia colony as cleaners because I hate those little black beetles I keep finding as well as the worms. Not sure the size of your beardie either but it will take a lot of them to fill it up and judging from their shells and size. I'm not sure I'd take the risk of feeding them as a staple in case of impaction. The dubia roaches are not as bad as I assumed and this is from someone who just left an apartment in Hawaii where it literally felt like Joe's Apartment and the roaches ran everything. Crickets stink and quite frankly scare me a lot more than the roaches do. I almost find it as satisfying to get my colony going and treat my roaches the way I treat my beardies, because afterall its what they are living on. Those soldier fly larvae are great but me and the wife let some sit for too long to open it up to a bunch of flies. One thing of note on them though is they are very slow. I fed them to one of the younger beardies that seems to eat anything on those red tongs.
Thank you so much! I didn't think of all of that. I also didn't know that the flies are not very fast. I opened a container once because I also waited too long and suddenly there were flies! They shocked me for sure. I just threw them all away. I def. can't imagine the roaches in Hawaii.
Yea, the flies seem to not know how to fly right away from what i saw. They stood around for a while cleaning themselves up and none of them took flight. I put 3 in my oldest beardies enclosure and he just looked at me like so what. I picked each of them up with tweezers by their wings and moved them to the others enclosure where he eats anything off the tweezers. Might even be able to refigerate them a bit before you open the container and slow them down even more. My wife would not approve of escaped bugs. We experienced that with crickets early on and the look she gave me still haunts me. :lol: