I've started to breed my own crickets,

Orchidartist

Orchidartist

New Member
so far so good. I have a few containers going filled with pinheads, but they are taking FOREVER to grow! I have a big container full that hatched out around Sept 16-20th but they are still like rice grain size. Another just hatched out this week and I dont see great size difference between the two. Is this normal? How long should it take before they are big enough to feed? Am I just being impatient? I am feeding them carrots, sweet potato, kale and apples. Thanks:D
DJ
 
Your are doing good , crickets usually have an eight week life cycle starting from birth, I'd say grain of rice around that age is fine, the will do some ultra growing between 1/4 to 3/4 from my own experience. I had about a thousand cricket eggs that never hatched, it really sucked, I bought thirty dollors worth of crikcets to get that many eggs.XD
 
Orchidartist said:
so far so good. I have a few containers going filled with pinheads, but they are taking FOREVER to grow! I have a big container full that hatched out around Sept 16-20th but they are still like rice grain size. Another just hatched out this week and I dont see great size difference between the two. Is this normal? How long should it take before they are big enough to feed? Am I just being impatient? I am feeding them carrots, sweet potato, kale and apples. Thanks:D
DJ
Click to expand...

Do you have a heat source? Put a light on them get or a heating pad. They will grow like crazy if fed and kept warm,
 
FooL111394 said:
Your are doing good , crickets usually have an eight week life cycle starting from birth, I'd say grain of rice around that age is fine, the will do some ultra growing between 1/4 to 3/4 from my own experience. I had about a thousand cricket eggs that never hatched, it really sucked, I bought thirty dollors worth of crikcets to get that many eggs.XD
Click to expand...


If you had $30 worth of adult crickets you must not have had a moist enough medium for them to lay in. INDIVIDUAL females can lay up to some 500 eggs in their lifetime.
 
Heat heat heat. Place them in a plastic tub. Stack egg cartons on one end of the tub, so the crickets can get up toward the lid. Place a heating pad on the top of the lid. This helps them grow fast. Also, on each end of the lid, place a screen "window" so they get some ventilation.

In addition to the veggies and fruits you are feeding them, you can feed chicken feed. Crickets need a good deal of protein and some calcium, in addition to other nutrient. Keep the moist foods away from the dry foods, or you will have an explosion of grain mites. These will not kill your crickets or your chams, but you don't want them anyway. They are gross and nasty.

Before you feed the crickets to your cham(s), separate a portion of them out and give them a good gutload. The dry gutloads are generally good for the chameleons when they eat the crickets, but are not always good for the crickets. In other words if you feed your crickets a dry reptile oriented gutload full time, you will have die off. I realize you aren't doing that but I just thought I'd add that here anyway.

But do give them chicken feed from the feed store, or some kind of feed that contains a good amount of protein and some calcium, etc., along with the veggies and fruit. I just sprinkle the chicken feed into the dry food area of the tub and the crickets nibble away at it. And keep them warm, and they'll grow. it takes about 6 weeks of warm growing time for them to reach adulthood.
 
Nicodemayo said:
If you had $30 worth of adult crickets you must not have had a moist enough medium for them to lay in. INDIVIDUAL females can lay up to some 500 eggs in their lifetime.
Click to expand...

I did i had to spray like a few times a day. I used organic soil.
It was sorta of a one night stand deal.
The bad thing about ordering adult crix is that they last for only a week or two. 1000 eggs in one night. A lot of them died off after a few days.
 
Nicodemayo said:
If you had $30 worth of adult crickets you must not have had a moist enough medium for them to lay in. INDIVIDUAL females can lay up to some 500 eggs in their lifetime.
Click to expand...

We have our crickets lay their eggs in a small plastic tub full of about 2 inches of damp peat moss. Just damp enough to clump in your hand. The tub has tiny holes near the top for a little ventilation. We let the crickets lay their eggs in the small tub for about 12 hours. We then remove the egg laying container, place a damp paper towel on top of the soil, place a lid on the container, and place the sealed container on top of the heating pad which is on top of the cricket bin. In about 8 days the eggs begin to hatch and we place the egg laying container into its own cricket bin. At this point your biggest challenge is keeping them warm and moist (place a moist paper towel in there and change it once a day). You can also place a damp lettuce leaf in there (not iceberg). Once the crickets have begun hatching in abundance you can start giving them some food.

Note: Most contemporary heating pads have "automatic off" controls, which will turn off your heating pad after a certain amount of time. We work around that by plugging the heating pad into a plug-in timer that can be set to turn off and on each hour. (On 1 hour, off 1 hour). This keeps your heating pad running off and on around the clock, and is safer too.
 
FooL111394 said:
I did i had to spray like a few times a day. I used organic soil.
It was sorta of a one night stand deal.
The bad thing about ordering adult crix is that they last for only a week or two. 1000 eggs in one night. A lot of them died off after a few days.
Click to expand...

We ordered adult crickets one time and the company sent us 1000 crickets that were the "ancient of days". Many of them died on the way. The others were so old and decrepit looking, it was awful. I complained. Next time I ordered from them I talked to them. Don't send me the ancient of days old stock crickets. Send me young adults. Crickets reach adulthood at about 6 weeks, and can live to about 12 weekstotal. They shouldn't die off in a week unless the company is sending you old stock. Our first shipment from that company was not the greatest, but we stayed with them because the price was right, and because they rectify things right away, and also they learn from their mistakes.

One time they sent us 1/4 inch crickets in boxes with large-gauge screen sides. Many of the crickets had escaped by the time the container reached our door. Duh. Someone in their packing department had grabbed the wrong shipping containers. But the company sent us out replacements right away.

We have been raising our own crickets for over a year, but were totally unprepared for the amount of crickets baby chams need (right now we have over 100 baby chams), so we have ended up buying about 30,000 crickets from this company over the past several months. We are just now getting to where we think we can hold our own. (I thought we were good to go a month or so ago, but, no, it's taken a little longer to get the complete cricket life cycle at the correct volume to satisfy all our needs.)

Keeping up with our cricket breeding operation is more time consuming than looking after our chams.
 
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Nicodemayo said:
If you had $30 worth of adult crickets you must not have had a moist enough medium for them to lay in. INDIVIDUAL females can lay up to some 500 eggs in their lifetime.
Click to expand...
my bad i meant to say "must not have had moist enough medium for them to HATCH in. When the soil gets to dry, the eggs wont hatch.
 
Thanks for the help, I'll try to get them a little more heat. They are in my laundry room in big plastic bins.
For gutloading I use my "mush cubes"...when I make fruit and veggie juice(I have a Jack Lalane power juicer, I love it LOL) I keep the mush and put it in an ice cube tray and freeze it. I give it to my feeders in the morning and they suck it right up:D They are practically exploding when eaten!
 
gesang said:
We ordered adult crickets one time and the company sent us 1000 crickets that were the "ancient of days". Many of them died on the way. The others were so old and decrepit looking, it was awful. I complained. Next time I ordered from them I talked to them. Don't send me the ancient of days old stock crickets. Send me young adults. Crickets reach adulthood at about 6 weeks, and can live to about 12 weekstotal. They shouldn't die off in a week unless the company is sending you old stock. Our first shipment from that company was not the greatest, but we stayed with them because the price was right, and because they rectify things right away, and also they learn from their mistakes.

One time they sent us 1/4 inch crickets in boxes with large-gauge screen sides. Many of the crickets had escaped by the time the container reached our door. Duh. Someone in their packing department had grabbed the wrong shipping containers. But the company sent us out replacements right away.

We have been raising our own crickets for over a year, but were totally unprepared for the amount of crickets baby chams need (right now we have over 100 baby chams), so we have ended up buying about 30,000 crickets from this company over the past several months. We are just now getting to where we think we can hold our own. (I thought we were good to go a month or so ago, but, no, it's taken a little longer to get the complete cricket life cycle at the correct volume to satisfy all our needs.)

Keeping up with our cricket breeding operation is more time consuming than looking after our chams.
Click to expand...

yah crickets are so hard to deal with, you should try newly *BORN* dubia roaches instead.
edit:*BORN*
 
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