orange head roaches smell - are they really worth the extra nutrition?

[Andee]

why are you sanitizing your plates every night? that is weird. Have two plates for each cage and that's it. Sanitize on weekends only unless mold becomes an issue. As far as cup feeding a cup feeder should take at most 20 minutes out of a weekend or week day night to make and then might take a bit to train to use but they usually learn rather fast. You are cleaning far too much. Unless you have like no cleaner crews you may need to clean daily if you have crickets or hornworms. That's it. I never clean this much. And honestly you only need to wipe down the chameleon cage daily and do a deep clean monthly. You are making yourself insane. This shouldn't be this hard lmao. I have 6+ feeder colonies plus 100+ of other inverts. How do you think I keep up with 2 chams, 4 leos, 9 cresteds, 2 birds, 4 hamsters, 14 rats, a dog, two cats, a tort, and a blue tongue skink. Orange heads and dubias aren't splitting hairs and I wouldn't reduce the amount of feeders you have now or replace them with something else because what you have now is easy care feeders.

The timer you describe should be about... 15 bucks in the right place, just so you know ^^.

 

[Andee]

Just so you know powdered vitamins are either poorly absorbed or easily overdosed with. So that's why I never rely on them as something to fix a lack of variety. They can fill in what CB insects are missing, but can't replace variety or good gutload.

 

[Franquixote]

I don't know why I feel like everything needs to be sterile, I guess that it's just my experience that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Also, some of my other hobbies like growing mushrooms require absolute sterility for success. After a day even the dry food is grungy looking and I can't imagine that's OK, but I'll try cutting back and seeing what happens.
I mean, your wet food like apples, mango, banana you just dump off the old food and leave the sticky residue behind and add fresh food on top of that and it's not a problem? I seem to get mold in 2 days if I do that and can't imagine an environment where that wouldn't be the case. Is it just that some mold on the bottom is ok? Do you put a paper towel down and put the wet food on that?

 

[Andee]

They should finish everything you put in, in a day honestly. If not you are putting waaaaay too much. Especially if you aren't changing everyday. How much vetilation do you have?