have a few questions about a cricket "enclosure"

[SS4Luck]

Im turning a lg rubbermaid tub into my cricket keeper and i have a few questions

1) what can i use to keep ants out? everything ive used before will kill my crickets too and i jsut cant for the life of me keep freaking ants out of my cricket bins

2) has anyone used some sort of substrate with their crickets? idk if it would help them or not, just seemed like an idea. I thought about doing it the silkworm way and getting a mountain of cricket crack and using that as a substrate/wood but that seemed stupid after i thought about it.

anyways ya thats about it lol

 

[Maurer3D]

Substrate for crickets is bad, it just makes it harder to clean them. I if you intent to breed crickets all you will need is small container of dirt (similar to a lay bin for chameleons), the dirt only needs to be like an inch deep.

As for ants if you raise it off the ground on a shelf, you can put ant traps at the legs of the shelf or spray the legs with an anti ant chemical. This is the only idea I came up with, but I can't say I ever had problems with ants.

 

[ferretinmyshoes]

If you put a large shallow pan, like a cookie sheet with water in it under your cricket bin it will keep ants out pretty easily without using chemicals.

 

[Mr Wilson]

I'm assuming you do not keep them in the house? Other wise I'm confused as to how you get ants inside of them. Do you have some sort of a cover on the bin as well?? We made a bin for our crickets that we cut a hole on the top and covered it with screening we got from Lowes.