Cricket Breeding

[CleaTheChameleon]

Hey everyone i don't know if im in the right forum but my dad said to me last night why don't you breed crickets instead of wasting your money every 2 days? I was like yeah i will do it but now i need a ton of help so anyone got an ideas or comments on what i should do and how, post a comment below. Thanks

 

[yoza717]

Crickets are easy to breed but smelly. Basically have some adult crickets and put a small tub of soil in with them (an old whip cream container works and potting soil). Remove it after a week and place it in another container and wait.

There are some helpful videos on YouTube, which explains it better than I can through writting, just do a search.

Good luck......

 

[Metric]

From what i've researched basically you leave a small container as the one just mentioned with potting soil in it. Leave it in a bigger cricket container that has about 10 female and 10 males (the females have 3 prongs on their butts, and the males have 2)

After about a week you'll see a bunch of small white dots (the eggs) in the soil. Remove the smaller container full of soil and eggs and put it into its own cricket house. after about 1-2 weeks the eggs should hatch.

Baby crickets can climb up glass walls (and most plastics i think) so you need to put a lining of box tape around the inner perimeter of the housing so they don't climb out.

It's cost effective, but very messy/smelly, and you can get a ton a escapee's. I wouldn't recommend it unless you have 3+ mouths too feed.

 

[Howdyco]

It works if you follow the simple directions on many websites discussing cricket breeding.
I tried this and I just found that my first dish of soil had some hatchling crickets emerge this past weekend. The things are tiny but there are alot there. At first it looked like maybe I had a dozen or two, now it looks like at least 50 (and possibly many more than that) have hatched out.
I am not sure I will continue to breed my own crickets, but it is cheap and pretty easy and I imagine if you use alot of crickets it would end up being much more cost effective.
Good Luck

 

[chambabysitter1]

Why not buy bulk instead of buying every 2 days from petco?

 

[warpdrive]

Hi Clea,

I'm going to base my reply on the fact that you only have one Chameleon.

first off, stop buying crickets from your local petco or other pet store.
they can be as high as ten cents per cricket, plus tax...that's about $5.40 for 50 crickets.
you should only buy like this when you are in dire need.

this leaves you with two choises left...buying in bulk or breeding them.
both are not great options for many reasons.

mostly because you only have one chameleon, it almost doesn't pay for you to buy in bulk (say 500 or 1000 at a time).
you will never use enough for them to be worth it unless your cham is always eatting full grown adults.

you could breed them.
not a bad idea, but understand that you will need a few 10 gal fish tanks or large buckets/containers to house all the little babys once they start to hatch.
think 1 tank for the 8 or 10 adults that you will always be using for egg laying.
then 3 tanks for the 3 sets of babys that you will work on to always have enough feeders for your chameleon.
each baby tank needs about a week for them to grow before you can start adding them to your "main" cricket keeper. maybe two weeks if they grow slowly.
once the babys are dumped into the main cricket keeper, you can then add another container of eggs to the empty baby tank.

here is a great link on ideas for breeding crickets....
http://skylab.org/~chugga/cricket/


with that said, there is one other way to save money on crickets.
since I always buy some worms about once per month, I include 2 cups of crickets (100 per cup) with my order.
that's $12.98 for 200 crickets with no added shipping. that's just shy of 7 cents per cricket.
this might not sound like much of a savings from the local petstore, but you also have not done any work to get them to the proper size you might need for your cham to eat.
you also wont be over loaded with crickets that will grow too large for you to use.


if you plan to breed them shoot me a PM for ideas. they are not hard at all to breed, but there are a few pitfalls to watch out for, like proper temps and drowning.

good luck,
Harry

 

[sandrachameleon]

I breed many types of bugs for my chameleons.

I find roaches are one of the easiest to breed, are least messy and near silent. So if you're going to breed something, consider breeding a non-infesting, nonclimbing tropical roach.

Other easy things to breed are isopods, stick insects, and superworms.
Zophobas morio /superworm/kingworm: https://www.chameleonforums.com/can-i-breed-my-19747/
isopod https://www.chameleonforums.com/isopods-16457/
crickets http://skylab.org/~chugga/cricket/

I find crickets smelly and noisy, and I do not enjoy cleaning their buckets and breeding them, so I Buy adult crickets from a local pet shop. They cost less than five cents a piece if you buy ten at a time. I usually buy 50 at time, once every week or two, so I pay less than 5 cents each. The adult males are gutloaded for a few days to aweek then fed off first (cuz they are noisy). In the meantime, I put the adult females into a separate container with some small containers of damp sand (if the soil isnt damp, the eggs wont hatch). They lay eggs, and not long later I essentially get free pin-head feeders for my smaller frogs. An individual female can lay up to some 500 eggs in her lifetime, but with me they likely lay only 50 or a hundred before they themselves become food for the chameleons.
The longest I keep the baby crickets is about a week. After that its too much effort for me - but its not hard to do.
They grow faster if they are kept warm. Place the sand or soil in which the eggs were laid into a plastic tub. Stack egg cartons (sideways) 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 or a low watt light above. Alternatively a heat pad underneath one end of the tub. Aim for 75F - 85F / 23C - 29C. Use a screen "window" on the lid and on one side of the plastic tub so they get some ventilation.

 

[CleaTheChameleon]

Oh my you guys are so amazing and i have used most of ur information and i will be uploading a video of my setup soon.