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First of allHi! My first BYC post, and it's gonna be a long one!
I'm a poultry noob, but I'm an old, old hand at bug raising. I "inherited" bearded dragons from my son over ten years ago, and decided I liked them so much, I wound up with 14 adults, and many babies raised and sold. Needless to say, raising my own lizard food became something of a necessity.
Insects I have raised: dubias, bsf, mealworms, superworms, silkworms, hornworms, pillbugs (or sow bugs or roly polies), redworms, crickets.
Some thoughts on the insects I have raised:
There is no other feeder insect remotely as easy to raise as dubias. You put them in a container and they stay there. They don't stink, don't make noise, live a long time, require minimal care, and will eat almost anything. I see a lot of mention of water crystals in this thread but I've found them to be completely unnecessary as long as I'm supplying them with some fresh fruit and/or vegetables. Here in coastal NC, the moisture from that is plenty for mine. I tried water crystals when I was first starting and they got kind of nasty and attracted fruit flies. I tossed them out and threw in a handful of chopped up carrots and my guys couldn't have been happier. I have three dubia bins going, with at least 5k in each and I haven't spent a penny on food for them since...well, ever. They eat table scraps, stale bread, that dog and cat food "dust" from the bottom of the bags, vegetable peels, etc, etc. I have fig trees and I fill bags with over ripe figs and store them in the freezer, they get those year around. (I know some folks on here make their own ACV. The roaches LOVE the apples you strain out of that. Try it!)
You couldn't pay me to raise crickets ever, ever again. They are the antithesis of dubias, smelly, noisy, short-lived. high maintenance.
Superworms are nice, but very slow to grow, slow to breed, so not an efficient feeder.
Maybe it's a climate thing, or maybe it's just me, but I was a total failure at maintaining a silkworm colony. I could always hatch out the eggs and get the worms to feeding size, but I could never successfully get them through the cocoon-to-moth stage to start a new generation. If you're able to do that, though, and have mulberry trees available, they are a great feeder.
My experiences with hornworms are basically the same as my silkworm experience. Great feeders, if you're able to raise them.
Bsf work well for me, but I have to start over every spring, which kind of sucks. I have a biopod and made a "bug house" by enclosing an old wooden jungle gym with screen wire. I set the biopod outside in the open in the spring and throw some old figs and something smelly like canned cat food in it to bait it. After I see some bsfs around it, I move it into the bug house and maintain them through the fall. When cool weather hits, I dump them out in the compost pile. If I had some place warm (NOT IN MY HOUSE) to keep them through the winter, I would raise them year round.
Mealworms are really easy and I keep quite a lot of them. I'm kind of biased against them, simply because they aren't a very good reptile food.
Pillbugs I just kind of raise for fun. I can't make enough of them to be a staple, but I raise them in my worm bins and don't have to provide any care for them and they're a helluva lot more interesting than the worms are.
Redworms really aren't - or haven't been - a feeder, I use them for composting. They do play a part in my feeding scheme, though. It works like this:
When I clean out my roach bins, I wet down all the poo and debris from it and dump it in my bsf biopod
About once a month or so, I clean out all the bsf poo from the biopod and put it in my worm bin.
The worm castings go in the garden, where I grow more stuff to be shared between myself, the dragons, and the roaches.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
So now, I'm trying to decide if I'm going to raise chickens or if I'm going to raise coturnix quail. I think the quail might fit better in my self sufficient ideal, but I really like the looks of those Buff Orps
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This thread doesn't move as fast as the mealworm thread for sure.just moving this thread up from page 3 to page 1
I decided to keep it as simple as possible for now, I filled the buckets quite full, hoping they will be able to get out w/o the ramps, I will watch them and if they have trouble leaving the buckets I will put a simple ramp likely just a stick of wood, like 1x4So, you'll have little ramps leading to the upper edge and then once they are out, the girls can get them?