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JB: Hi everybody! Please excuse my voice or coughing because I'm kind of sick right now, but I wanted to show you my roach setup.
This is just how I keep my Blaptica dubia roaches.
This is a pretty large translucent Sterilite bin.
I like the one that has these latches on it because I'm dealing with a ton of roaches.
I've painted the outside of this bin just kind of dark,
I used a spray paint just to make it darker because these guys prefer it dark.
I don't think you actually have to do that
but I do recommend you get the translucent style plastic because that seems to be the smoothest
and while this kind of roach can't climb this smooth kind of plastic,
they can climb some of the other plastics. The darker bins sometimes have a rougher feel to them.
For the lid, I cut out two kind of large aeration areas and I just hot-glued some screen.
Because I'm a bit of a bug-o-phobe sometimes,
I did a layer of screen there and a layer of screen there, so it's a double layer of screen.
You probably don't have to do that, but I just like to take some precautions, because I'm not a big fan of the bugs.
In order to breed, this species of roach does need some heat.
So I'm just using a heat pad that I actually got from Walgreens.
I was looking for one that will stay on all the time - there are some that shut off after like 3 or 4 hours.
You can probably use one of those reptile under-tank-heater things.
This was cheaper for me to get and it's worked well for 2 years now.
Just make sure it's plugged into a surge protector type thing just to make sure nothing happens.
Looking in the bin here, I just have a lot of egg crate stacked up vertically on the side.
I have a little bit of open space over here because I like to just be able to set the food down and [laughing] just back away a little bit.
The vertically stacked egg crate gives them a lot of area to crawl around on, and it lets them regulate the temperatures.
If they want to be warm, they can be down on the ground area; if they want to get a little cooler they can climb up higher.
This colony has been going for a couple of years now.
I feed off from it once a week.
I've also sold some of them just to keep it at a regulated pace.
You can see I've got a lot of big ones, a lot of adults.
The male adults have wings, the female adults just have little wing nubs.
Trying to catch these... looking through a camera, not gonna go well.
Here's a big female.
I'm still not a huge fan of how the adults feel when they crawl on me, but they don't bite or anything.
This is a female; as you can see she's got some good size on her.
Here's an adult male, and you can see his wings. Nice long wings compared to the female.
Oh! And the males do kind of jump.
They can jump and flutter down but I've never actually seen them fly with those wings. Just something to keep in mind, they won't really fly up at you.
If you're bringing up this kind of colony for like crested geckos, this is about the size you'd feed to an adult, maybe a little smaller.
We call those smaller roaches nymphs.
I guess there's a way to sex these nymphs a little earlier on, but I just don't care to worry about that very much.
The good thing about these guys compared to crickets is that they do have some sort of an odor, but it's kind of a musty smell.
I think it depends on what you feed them.
They definitely don't stink like crickets tend to.
The only sound you'll hear [skittering on cardboard] is that crawling sound, you won't hear chirp chirp chirp.
These babies are perfect for your smaller geckos. Not super-tiny species of gecko obviously, but this is about as small as the baby roaches get.
They'll get maybe a little bit smaller than that.
They're pretty tiny, and they're kinda cute as babies - I think they kinda look like roly polies a little bit.
Pill bugs, whatever you want to call them... isopods. Anyway...
To feed them, this is what I do, and I got this info from other people.
Down there, they're cleaning out leftover Crested Gecko Diet.
That's one bonus if you have crested geckos and you're trying to have a feeder animal like roaches - these guys will actually eat the extra CGD.
That saves you some cleaning. You just put that in when you change it out, leave it in for a day, and they'll clear that out.
I also like to leave a dish of - this is ground-up dog food.
Some people just throw regular dog food in there, but I like to grind it up because it seems like they eat it a little bit faster if you grind it up.
It might just me being crazy, I don't know, I like to grind it up because they're just little bugs.
Some people like to do chicken feed as well. I don't have a local supplier so I haven't tried it.
For liquid, if you're offering the CGD leftover, they'll get some liquid through that.
Some people use those cricket crystal type things but that gets really expensive.
I like to offer overripe bananas sometimes, if I have bananas past their due date.
This is what the roaches will do to oranges if you just cut 'em in half and throw 'em on in here, they'll just drill those right out.
Let me just make sure I'm not throwing any roaches away...
They'll eat all the good stuff out of the oranges.
That was a slice, there's one in there. Come on out, buddy.
Actually, this looks like this one was almost just born. When they first come out of the mother they're like, a really neat white color.
This guy looks like he's just been born and his exoskeleton is just starting to harden up, so let's be careful with that guy.
This egg crate, I really recommend this - some people just use egg cartons, but this offers a lot of height. And as the colony gets bigger you can add more and more egg crate out this way.
I just like them to be able to bunch up and find each other so they can mate sometimes, so I don't want to overdo it and put too much egg crate in here.
I also put extra paper towel tubes in there because they seem to like to crawl up in there.
I just use these mayo jar or peanut butter jar lids and just put extra food in there.
I've seen it said you don't want to have too much in the way of substrate because it gets to be a pain in the butt to find the babies when you want to feed them off.
But you do want to leave some of the frass, or roach poop on the bottom. Isn't that delightful?
The roach poop apparently gives the babies something to eat, yuck.
It also gives them a safe place to hide, because they might not feel as safe in the egg carton, so I do leave some of the frass on the bottom.
I do leave some of the frass, but probably once a month I'll clean some of the frass out of there.
You'll also get some die-offs, some dead roaches, and it's kind of a pain in the rear to pick out dead roaches one at a time, so...
... I went to the dollar store and got a cat sand scoop.
Generally the live roaches will climb out, but the dead roaches will still be in the scoop and you can throw those away.
Yeah, see, there's some bigger dog kibble in there, and they don't really seem to eat it very much if it's in chunk form.
At least, my roaches don't. They might be weird roaches. So I like to blend it up and they'll eat that dried powdery stuff.
So yeah, you'll get dead roaches, and you'll want to clean those out, and sometimes it's kind of gross...
... because living roaches might hide in the carcass of the dead roach. They are roaches, they do roachy things.
So just be aware of that, if you're throwing away the carcasses, kind of give them a once-over, make sure there's no living critters hanging out in there.
We don't really want that stuff to go into landfills because these guys could start breeding where there's warm weather and we don't want that to happen.
They will pretty much eat anything you want to give them, but I don't recommend throwing meat in there.
They do well with a lot of different kinds of fruits especially.
In the summertime when you might get fruit gnats, you want to put enough food in there that the roaches can eat quickly or you might start getting gnats.
So, yeah, I've got lots of females right now so I might need to start separating this colony out, maybe make a second one. There's just so many females.
[skittering]
But they're kinda interesting, sometimes I'll just sit and watch what they do, I try not to get too attached though because we know where they're going... gecko bellies!
One more quick tip, if you have Crested Gecko Diet that you've been feeding to your geckos, and it's dried overnight, all you have to do -
mist it down a little bit, and it will kind of rehydrate itself and you can give it to the roaches too and they'll get moisture that way as well.