variety of food...

vgaines

Member
OK..Not having the best of luck with breeding crickets..lol Lucky to have several pet stores in my area that carry them My question is mainly about silkworms. I am in the Houston Texas area and temps here have been between 95-100* so shipping worms is not the best idea. What I was wondering is how hard is it to hatch and raise silkworms from eggs? Is it safe to ship eggs in weather this hot? I was also wanting to know about Blue Bottle flies. I would like to have the maggot form so I can keep them in the ice box and take out however many I want and have them turn into flies. Both my bearded dragon and veiled love flies. The only feeders I can get around here are crickets, meal worms, wax worms, large super worms and sometimes horn worms. My local Petco sometimes carries calci-worms but they are usually not real good batches. I want my boy to have a good healthy diet so any tips or suggestions will be appreciated...:D
 
eggs are easy as long as your hatching quantities lower than 25,000 at a time

there are a couple blogs on this site that detail it pretty well. Short version: get some tupperware, throw a paper towel down and sprinkle however many eggs you want on it, wait a week or two at room temp, babies.
Once the first hatchlings are out wait a half day or so till the majority have hatched then use a syringe to squirt some chow down for them w/o crushing them (or use leaves).

BB flies are easy too. You can ship the BB spikes/pupae and the silk eggs w/ an ice pack to prevent it from hatching in the mail. If you want to buy the silk eggs in bulk to keep in your fridge (and hatch them out in small quantities) an ice pack is needed
 
I've had great success with silkies and I have the same temp issues. I got mine from coastalsilkworms.com. You will wanna get a cold pack when you order them. They have been easy and really fun to breed. They are messy but if you have the time to keep them clean you can keep them going. Pretty awesome staple feeder if you ask me. Dubias are great too.. I just started breeding them and seem to be SUPER EASY.. and the heat is okay for them. I started with 100 nymphs, 15 females and 5 males. They are steady making little ones! I don't know too much about the flies. :( This is where I got my information to breed the silkies. She has a ton of useful info! Good luck! :)

https://www.chameleonforums.com/blogs/pigglett79/763-silk-worm-rearing-breeding-part-1.html
 
I know costal silkworms can add in a hot or cold pack if needed for shipping. Hornworms, from my experience so far, have grown faster in warmer temps. Back in april here in Pa it was cooler and they took forever to grow to a decent size for my veiled, now in less than a week at times they can be somewhat close to two inches. I get the hornworms egg cups from Great lakes hornworms and they are usually hatched by the time I get them but really small, I just got some weds. this week and are showing the blue coloration and are about 1/4 inch plus, I can probably give some to my new panther chan later this weekend. As for raising silkworms, piglet has this: https://www.chameleonforums.com/blogs/pigglett79/silk-worm-rearing-and-breeding/ and one for hornworms as well.
 
Thanks for all of the replies. I will be ordering some silkworm eggs and some dubias and some BB Fly maggots.. I don't have access to mulberry trees so I hope the chow will be ok for the baby silks. I will def. look at the links yall sent me. I would love to have it where I raised all of my feeders. :D
 
I know you can order silkie chow, not sure if bug burger wet chow (mix the powder with boiling water and let sit) will work for silkies, I made a huge batch the other week and have it in the fridge. I used up the last batch on the last set of hornworms that blew thru what was in the cups and got massive. I had to make an enclosure like someone on here did before using an old plastic food container.
 
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