How many pinheads?

[Lpsouth1978]

Hey all, I am in the final process of preparing for eggs to hatch. I have pretty much everything ready, except I am still not sure how many feeders I will need. Can some of you share how many pinheads you use? Most helpful would probably be an approximate number per day for each chameleon. For example, each baby eats about 20 pinheads a day. I am trying to figure out how many I will need to order each week. Right now I have 119 eggs with more on the way. The first clutch is almost 6 months old so could start to hatch at any time. Any help is appreciated.

 

[Saldarya]

Well, it would seem silly for me to simply to respond with 'ALOT!!!' so I will try to answer the best I can with how I do things.

To start, for neonates I feed almost exclusively Hydei FF. This is for a couple of main reasons.

1. Costs, I can make FF cultures all day long until the cows come home for nearly nothing. So when you NEED food and cant worry about cricket production, FF are great.

2. I keep the neonates in tubs with screen bottoms to let the water drain out. The pin heads can get through the screen. The FF can, but they tend to crawl around foliage and sides of tubs mainly.

I raise Crickets, I rather I use to, Ill get to that in a sec. But when breeding crickets I was producing about 10,000 a week and that was not always enough.

Now, Ghanns, who is a sponsor here, has their Breeders program. It is an AMAZING deal for those that need lots of food. For example, I just bought 20,000 1/16" for a GREAT deal. Good enough that I stopped raising crickets!!

I would suggest you reach out to them and see about getting signed up if you are going to raise that many babies.

Again though, start with FF for the first few weeks at least, then move to a mix of the two, then once they get some size to them, you can escalate the cricket size as well as introduce dubia nymphs, etc...

I will tell you a secret that is not such a secret really. If you are looking to sell these babies, and I assume you are with that many, your ability to make money or just break even is all in the feeding of the babies. They will literally eat you out of house and home if you dont have a plan.

HTH,

 

[deerharvester]

Bean Beatles are a great low maintenance and prolific feeder that are excellent for baby pathers. If you're going to order them get 1/16 in, pinheads are small they can handle 1/8 inch right off the bat.

Scott

 

[fluxlizard]

20 per day is not a bad place to start with estimates.
It can be more or less depending on the size of the insect and the baby chameleon, but I think your ballpark guess is a good start.
Also, keep in mind that tiny insects drown in mist really easily and dehydrate quickly- you will probably have some losses once they are "in-terrarium".

I feed hatchlings all sorts of newly born insects- baby lobster roaches and baby mealworms, pinhead crickets, fruit flies.

 

[Lpsouth1978]

Thank you all for the info. Right now I am planning on many fruit fly cultures and pinheads, eventually moving up to baby Dubia roaches as well.

I am hoping to get on the G.R.E.A.T. program with Ghann's, but according to the guidelines on their website I do not qualify. I will certainly try calling and talking to them about working something out. It seems like for just the first clutch of 26 eggs I will need to plan on roughly 4000 pinheads/fruit flies a week. OUCH!!