Baby Cost?

[Justin Carl]

I was just wondering if anyone has added up the cost of feeding baby chameleons.
Lets say you have a clutch of 40 eggs, they all hatch, and all live.
You already have the baby cages set up too.
Do you buy lots of 5000 crickets?
Fruit fly cultures? how many?

 

[nightcrawler]

40 babies x a minimum of 10 crickets a day each x a minimum of 90 days befor you sell them= 36000
youll need 36000 crickets say
divide 36000 by 1000 = 36
36 times $16 per 1000 crickets = 576

plus cages
plus lights
plus plants
plus supplments
plus other food items
water bills
eletric
plus time.

lots of stuff.

 

[Vegas Chad]

That sounds about right to me...

 

[AFH]

When they're really small, you can do fruit flies. They are super easy to breed and pretty prolific. You can get a culture (1000 flies and laying media) for $10-$15 that will keep producing for a month. So that might cut the costs by say $50?

 

[Dave Legacy]

I spent $10 on a Hydei FF culture and have been feeding off it daily for the last 2 weeks or so. I'm starting to think raising baby chameleons was easier than I had originally thought!

 

[Treetop Chameleons]

if you can learn to grow your own feeders it can be pretty cheep.

 

[pohchunyee]

Generally my Veiled eggs hatch around 6 - 8 months...... when the first indication of hatching I will start cultures of fruit flies (D. megaloster) (about 10) and start another colony of fruit flies (D. hydei) (about 10) a week later. I start a new colony of 10 about every other week....just to keep up with those monster!!!! when they are about a month old (depends on their size; I switch them to 1/8" -1/4" cricket and when they are between 2.5 - 3 months old... i sell them!!

(p/s: Veiled babies are pigs!!!!!)

My advice for private breeder is breed your own fruit flies (easy to grow) and find a good supplier for cricket when they are old enough to feed on cricket).... you can even get pin head cricket if you don't like to breed fruit flies.

 

[Justin Carl]

Great info!
Where are all the big breeders?
What do you guys have up your sleves?

 

[Dankmeleon]

yea there should be a sub forum for feeder breeding

 

[RhettusMaximus]

babies

This is good info and I'm with Justin I'd like to know what the bigger breeders do... I have 40 eggs that should hatch (yah yah don't count your chickens before they hatch haha) sometime in July or early August and would like to start drawing up plans for preparations asap.

 

[ChrisnLisa]

It seems like breeding crickets is just as easy. I would start with the fruit flies and as they age a bit set up a few containers for cricket breeding. A few summers ago crickets started breeding in my red-eyes enclosure and i didnt have to give them crickets for a few months...it was great.