to roach or not to roach

[xXFooFooLaFluffXx]

want peoples opinions on roaches.

our food bill is gettin terribly big, spilling over to about £250 a month in crickets!i hate the bleedin things but deperate times call for desperate measures! ive heard they are cheap, breed well and plenty, and that beardies love um. but i also heard that beardies can get fed up of them quite quickly n then you cant get rid of the bloody things! so can people give me their experience on them

do they help with food bills? is it worth it?
can you feed them to pretty much any insect eating lizard?

Cat and Cel x

[Reptilover]

i dunt now iv just been looking at them because our beardie food price is getting extreamly high!!

[boabloketony]

Wow £250 a month ???

I don't pay that for electricity, I don't know how you manage,

Do you buy the bags of 1,000 crickets? Might be cheaper than the individual tubs.

[Crownan]

Roaches are great!!

I got a starter colany and they have bred like mad now. Took a few months for them to get established.

My BD loves them too

[xXFooFooLaFluffXx]

Originally Posted by boaboytony5

Wow £250 a month ???

I don't pay that for electricity, I don't know how you manage,

Do you buy the bags of 1,000 crickets? Might be cheaper than the individual tubs.

lol crredit cards. have you tried tubbin thousands of crickets up? lol

get tubs for a quid a tub anyway so cant get much cheaper than that. think i might give roaches a go if cel will agree to it lol

[HadesDragons]

I'm in the process of switching over to roaches. My colonies are just hitting sustainability points, so my adult beardies are starting to be switched to male roaches as their livefood.

So far they all seem far more interested in them than crickets, and will sometimes choose a roach over a locust. I bought 75 adults and juveniles over the summer, so it has taken about 6 months for me to be happy that there are enough there to start feeding them off. Saying that I now have 50 or so breeding females, each popping out 20 or so babies every month, with a lot more 1 moult away from being adults. There's enough demand that any excess could be sold on ebay etc as feeders.

As for buying and tubbing up 1000s of crickets, that's what I do over the summer. Bulk bags work our far, far cheaper than buying tubs, even for £1 each. I put a Guide on here not too long ago about how to do it without touching crickets and without anything escaping. Just use big, deep tubs, rotate them around so you use one until it is completely empty of crickets, then you can empty it out, clean it etc and restock.

[Ally]

Mine love the roaches too...
To stop escapees I put vasaline around the top of a big plastic tub, put the beardies and roaches in there for feeding. That way I know there are none left.