This is from a post by Gesang. I'm having trouble getting the link to copy. Search for the link "how do breeders do it?"
In the adult breeding container, are you placing a separate egg laying container, or do you have the adults laying there eggs in a substrate? If they are laying in a separate container, how long do you leave the container with the adults? My guess is that you either are not starting off with enough adults, or you are leaving the egg laying chamber in with the adults so long that they are beginning to eat the hatchling crickets.
Start with at least 200 adult crickets. Keep them at about 90F, by placing a human heating pad on their container. Place the laying container in with them, full to the rim with moistened soil, or soil/sand, or peatmoss (we use peatmoss). Leave it in there for 8-12 hours. Remove it. (Replace it with another one a week before you'll be ready for more pinheads, or replace it immediately, and by the time your babies need them the crickets will be a little larger and more filling, and your babies won't need to eat as many.)
Place the first one on top of the heating pad and cover it with a damp paper towel. Check this egg container regularly to keep the towel and substrate moist (not wet). If it helps, you can place the egg container in a slightly larger container that has a lid and place both on the heating pad (to help retain moisture- but don't let it get too wet). The crickets should hatch in 9 days. When they begin to hatch, place the egg laying chamber, by itself, in a larger sterlite container, place a large leaf of romaine lettuce on top of the egg laying container's soil, and place a damp paper towel over that. (there are 2 additional steps we add to this but they are a little complicated and not necessary.) Replace the Romaine with fresh every day or so. As the baby crickets age, sprinkle milled dry food around the edges of the sterlite container.
Keep all of this set on top of a portion of the heating pad. Keep the paper towel moist. You will have many hundreds of crickets, maybe even a thousand. Enough to last at least a couple of weeks, if you are feeding out 40 a day. In another 9 days your next batch of crickets will be ready. If I remember correctly, each female cricket can lay 100 eggs in her lifetime. If you feed out a lot of your adults, then start with a larger colony.
You will also want to preserve some of the hatchlings for your future batches of adults. We rotate through their life-cycle with 4 different containers. Adult, hatchling, several weeks old, and a little older. We feed out to our various chameleons from each container.
Here is a link that may help you:
http://www.anapsid.org/crickets.html
__________________
2.2 Veileds, 2.2 Sambava, 1.1 Ambilobe, 1.1 Ambanja, 1.0 Nosy Be/Ambanja, 2.2 Bearded Pygmy chams, 1.0 Temporalis, eggs, eggs, eggs, 0.1 Beagle, 2.1 Homo sapiens
