# Pinheads - Breeding crickets



## Frank H (Nov 3, 2005)

Hello. I just bought a dollar worth of adult crickets. I have heard its easy to get babies from adults, but havnt heard any explinations. Can someone please give me a breakdown of how to breed crickets? I looked 9 pages deep in the food and feeding forum, no luck.
Any help is appreciated.

Frank


----------



## marcop (Jan 8, 2006)

*try this link*

Hi,

This link should provide all the info you need to breed the crockets.

http://www.iosphere.net/~ajs/breeding.htm

Good luck....Marco


----------



## Frank H (Nov 3, 2005)

that is a great link! thanks, Marco

Frank


----------



## Frank H (Nov 3, 2005)

Marco, that is a very informative page, but I am looking for a simple way to get some pinheads once in a while. These will be like a monthly snack. However my monthly snack is costing $30 to feed my 25+ frogs. I am looking for a way to breed one batch in a simple yet effective way. I am not trying to go all out like the directions in that link-however if thats the only way then so be it.

I have the 10+ crickets in a plastic shoe box tupperware with moist coco substrate. I am feeding them fish flakes and some pieces of cat food. They are in a warm space-around 78-80 degrees.

I dont want to have adult crickets around all the time. I just want to buy a dollar or 2 worth and get some babies out of them every month or so.
Any other suggestions?

Frank


----------



## bluedart (Sep 5, 2005)

One method I read somewhere is this:

Put a 1:2 ratio of males:females in a parmesean cheese styled container (like you sprinkle on spaghetti). Keep the holes exposed to the substrate and leaf a little piece of fruit or something in with the crickets to eat. Leave them in there for several days and pull out the container. Wait, and in a few days to a week or two you'll see pinheads hopping about. Good luck!


----------



## Frank H (Nov 3, 2005)

My first attempt failed. All the crickets died. I had them in a plastic shoebox with damp coco shavings. They had plenty of fish flakes to eat and some cat food bites. There was a milk jug lid with a cotton ball soaked in water. My only idea is that they suffocated with the lid on. Sound right?

Frank


----------



## defaced (May 23, 2005)

Unless it was a gladware type of container that's air tight, I doubt suffication was the problem. I think is was probably a lack of air flow that created overly moist conditions. Also, adults don't last long, like a week if that, so it's possible breeding did take place. Keep the container they were in warm (upper 80s) and the substrait slightly moist and you'll find out if some pinheads hatch.


----------



## Guest (Nov 9, 2006)

They don't need or want damp conditions, just a water source.

Here's how I do it:

Keep the adult crix in a tupperware or aquarium with some eggcrate. Feed them fish food or cat food and carrot peelings or lettuce for water. You can also buy that cricket quencher gel stuff and just sprinkle it in. Room temps or warmer.

Place in with the adult crix a smaller tupperware that is filled with moist coco bedding or peat. Lay some kind of screen on top of the bedding, and cut away the inside of the tupperware top so just the rim is holding the screen down. This is to stop the adult crix from messing up the bedding. They will lay their eggs through the screen into the bedding. Leave it with the adult crix for a week or two. The bedding has to stay moist of the eggs will dry out. After a week or 2 remove the laying container to another tupperware or aquarium. The tiny pinheads will hatch out in huge numbers over a couple of weeks, depending on the temp. I make 2 hatching containers and swap back and forth.

Once you get it going its easy, and food faster with crickets faster than any food source I know of. They do jump around and make noise though...


----------



## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

Breeding crickets is not listed much in the Food section since hundreds of pages on the subject can be found just typing in "breeding crickets" into google. I prefer Kaplan's artcile Breeding and Raising Crickets. It's the long time standard, and works great. It's how I bred my crickets when I raised leopard geckos commercially (using the extra pinheads to feed my neophyte frog collection).

I bred crickets for 6 years by the 10s of thousands (no wonder I have an allergy....) and currently do small batches just like you do.

Healthy crickets make healthy babies! Lots of times I've seen healthy crickets show up in pet stores in good shape just to have them go downhill due to unclean conditions due to overstocking their tanks (only a problem the first couple of days but still...). I recomend finding out what day your supplier gets their crickets, and getting them that day or the next. Preferably go in when its not busy so you can get them to pick out the crickets you want. You're looking for winged adults, not just large crickets, and you want to make sure you've got both sexes of adults. 1:2 or 1:1 ratio males:females works fine.

The first couple days I have them I generally do not give them a spot to lay, instead working on making sure they are healthy. I feed them sweet potato slices, dark romaine lettece (aviod using iceburg, its nutritionally worthless other than as a water source), and used water gel packets for water.

I keep my adults in a large critter keeper or a small 5.5 gallon tank with a screen lid (nice and airy). 2/3 of the tank is taken up by vertical egg crate, the other third being where the food and water is. Water crystals are replaced as soiled, and food is replaced as it dries/wilts. They have a heat lamp to keep them hot (80-90 F) to help them produce well. Crickets kept cooler may breed but the eggs rarely hatch.

For an egg laying container, I use a small gladware round dish, frog shipping container, or similar sized dish where I place 2-3 inches of peat moss. This is kept moist and kept in with the adult crickets only a couple of days by which point most of the females will look noticably slimmer, and you should be able to see eggs at the side of the container. The container gets a lid (plastic with hole in center covered with fine mesh I got from Ed's Fly Meat) and is put on a heat mat until it hatches, around two weeks.

When the eggs hatch, the egg laying container is moved to a large rubbermaid container that has no lid as its too deep for the pinheads to hop out of. It also has clear packing tap around the rim - if they somehow climb the side of the container, they cannot crawl up this super slick surface. Some egg crate is provided, as well as sweet potato and romain lettuce leaves. Do no use water crystals or any other water source besides food, as the pinheads will just stick to it and die. I usually end up replacing the yam slices and lettuce leaves more often to help them stay hydrated (the food can dry out more with the adults as they have another water source).


----------



## widmad27 (Aug 9, 2006)

I use a clean plastic container like the ones they use at bait shops for worms and add 1 part peat and 1 part sand which give a good base for laying, i put it in the adult cricket container for 24 to 48 hours in order to have maximum laying, then i remove and put i a small tuper ware container for 12 to 14 days and there you have it pinheads, usaully produces about 500 pinheads.

To kept them alive just sprinkle in crushed up fish food or yeast, they eat it up and also have a soaked sponge for water consumption.

Real simple food to produce for your little buggers.


----------



## lilruthie102 (Aug 2, 2006)

I gotta be honest here, I know everyone has these big explinations for how they breed crickets, but i keep them for my white's tree frogs, and I can't keep them from breeding! I throw them in a kritter keeper, with some wood chips on the bottom, and just give them food, and i have baby crickets flying around everywhere, and then if i don't clean the keeper every week i end up with pinheads everywhere too. so if you don't want to get too involved, that works for me even though i don't want it too. 
Ruth

oh and on a gross note: if you leave the adult crickets and let them die the maggots will eat them. just fyi ... just seems less work than taking them out jsut for them to get thrown away


----------



## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

The maggots and the flies producing them generally aren't the ones you want hanging around tho... With crickets one of the reasons you clean the tanks of dead adults so much is to specifically avoid the situation of having those flies around.


----------



## Guest (Nov 12, 2006)

I posted a few weeks ago about breeding crix and got some good info and all of a sudden i have two 10gal tanks with a hell of a lot of pin heads and the bad thing is they grow quick. now i have to figure out an efficient way of sorting the crix into sizes. I tried dumping them on wire mesh hoping only the pin heads would fall through when shaken but that method didnt work very well.
Also I bought a spring tail culture from a few months ago and they were doing great and i was tking some out of there tank a few times a week to put into vivs then last week the culture fizzled out to nothing for no reason. Now i have to pick up another culture at the next show and start over.


----------



## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

With the springtails... were you feeding them on a consistent basis? Adding food makes the culture boom, then you have to continue to feed them more food on a more frequent basis to keep the population up. If you fail to do this, the culture will crash. If you even have just a couple springs left in the culture no reason to toss it, just slowly build up the population again. The only reason you'd have to start completely over is if you cooked or suffocated your cultures, which is the only cases you'd have all the animals die.


----------



## Guest (Nov 12, 2006)

the culture was indeed booming as it was producing more then i needed so i cut the rice,and fruit to half of what i was putting in there. within a short time there were hardly any left. I just looked through there and at most there may be 20-30 left. when i first got the culture there were hundreds in there to start it off.
I am also going to try some of the other insects that are out there to give some more variety. Someone at the Hamburg show (think it was mike shrom) had several other kinds of feeder insects for darts.


----------



## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

What happened is that you had a massive population crash by cutting the available food amount in half. Feed them small amounts on a regular basis, and increase the amount with the population (both in number and in size of offspring) as the culture grows again. The culture sent to you was likely a booming culture that had been fed well and regularly before you got it.

Mike Shrom also offers shorelinite beetles which I like a lot... tho I haven't tried them with many thumbnails, the tinc group especially seems to love them. They are very slow in producing tho, having a boom every couple of months just on RFB media, tho Matt Mirabello is experimenting with another type of food (which I'm also testing) to see if the cultures will produce faster... either way their generation times are much longer, and are good for only the occasional treat.


----------



## Guest (Nov 13, 2006)

with the few i have left, what kind of time frame am i looking at to get back to a decent colony. Should i buy another culture or just wait for this one to build back up??


----------



## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

It depends on two things... how much effort you are willing to put into the culture, and how badly you need springtails. Going by your species list in your sig, I don't think you're going to have a major crisis by waiting on your regular culture to get back in gear. It would probably take a month or so to really get your culture back up to feeding level. The babies appear quickly after feeding is increased, but you have to make sure to stay on top of the feedings to keep the babies growing. If done well in about a month you can split the culture (the best way to reduce your population rather than letting it crash - you can neglect the new cultures as much as you want to keep the pops low).


----------

