# My B. Dubia (feeder roach) colony DIY (VERY pic heavy)



## loogielv

I know these won't work for most frogs, but I believe majority of us keep other animals and even still, we all love DIY write ups and lots o pics, so here's my contribution.

For those of you that dont know, Blaptica Dubia is a type of cockroach that is perfect for breeding and feeding reptiles, amphibians and larger insects like spiders.

Blaptica Dubia roaches:

* cannot fly
* cannot climb
* make no noise
* have NO smell
* are slow and easy to catch
* have more meat to shell ratio than crickets
* breed very easily
* are easily sexed by just sight
* grow quite large, but start off very small so you always have the perfect sized feeder for whatever pet you have

In a nutshell, they make breeding crickets look like a joke. And make buying crickets look like you're nuts! 

I like to tell a story when I post stuff, so let me start at the beginning.

A lady was nice enough to give me a colony of B. Dubia that she ordered online. She ordered 250 juveniles back in August and basically neglected them. Kept them filled with food and water crystals, but really didn't do much else. She cut a hole in her lid and taped some sort of screen door type thing onto the top.








I really dont know what she was thinking. Obviously the opening is too big and allows for too much heat/humidity loss. The chance of escapees is greatly increased (even with b. dubia) when you just drop a screened apparatus on top of a lid and tape it down with carpentry tape. And plumbing tape.









Here's the underside of the lid:








Kinda hard to see there, but there's HUGE gaps between the bottom of the screen and the top of the lid. 

These pics are from after I transferred them to a new enclosure with a better (IMO) setup.

She put substrate in there, which isn't a big no no, but certainly makes it harder to clean and catch babies and all that. Really a pain. 
Here you can see the substrate and the dish that she used for their food. (A rabbit food I believe)








Keep in mind, this is after I was fooling around and trying to catch all the loners and get them transferred, so the bowls are all emptied. 
Anyway, in that pic you can see a large dead adult male. He died in the food dish, so I imagine he couldn't escape due to the slippy sides of the dish. Obviously that's not what killed him, as he had plenty of food 

sigh. This was their water dish, filled about halfway w/ crystals.








"Hey Loogie, being that the dish is deep and slippy plastic, how could they get into the water dish, and if they did manage to, how could they get out?" Is that what you're thinking? well, you're right. There was about 75 roaches stuck in this little bin, even babies. They had burrowed down into the bottom of the crystals and were probably miserable. They're just roaches and all, but seriously, come on!









Here's the crystals (transferred to another bowl in the process of removing all the roaches from the crystals. 








You can see they're stained yellow and filled w/ all sorts of nasty stuff.

I'm keeping her bin in the state it's in (complete with food and water crystals stewn about) until I can be sure i've gotten majority of the babies out. I still see several every time I open the top and can only catch em when they're in the crystals or something similar. I even left the dead adult in there, just cuz it gives me the willies.









Now onto my enclosure. This is my first time keeping any type of insect, feeder or similar. Not my thing at all. I dont understand how anyone could like these enough to keep as a show pet, but I will admit, they are fascinating to watch. Through a screen anyway.

Here is my "outer bin". I'll explain more on it in a sec.









Here is the "housing bin" sitting inside the outer bin. 








I used some girly blankets someone gave us to insulate the housing bin. It's about 50 degrees in my garage, and was getting down to 30s a few nights ago, so I knew I had to keep them warm somehow.

The purpose of the outer bin is two fold. 1) to allow an insulating barrier to keep heat in the housing bin. 2) if a roach gets out, he'll just find his way into the outer bin and probably make his way down into the blankets. (in summer time, no blankets and he'll certainly fall down into the outer bin) An escapee is NOT AN OPTION for me. MY wife would seriously, without joking, end my life. I would be on the news as a missing person. She's very wonderful and super tolerant of my quirks and hobbies, and obsessions as they change. Even letting me keep roaches in the garage. One escape and it's me buried in the woods somewhere. I even had to tell her they're not roaches, but in fact a special breed of cricket that can't climb, fly or chirp. For some reason, a bin of crickets is less gross than a bin of ****roaches.

I have a reptile under tank heater, and a heating pad under the housing bin (inside the outer bin). Here is the control for the heating pad.








I dont leave it on much, as I dont believe heating pads were made to run 24x7 and a fire would be pretty possible.
Even with just the reptile heater i'm constantly worried about the heater shorting and overheating and melting the bin and me becoming infested with roaches.







I can only hope divorce is all she'd go for.

Pretty poof balls on the blanket









With the lid of the outer bin on, the blankets push out the sides a bit and this is the amount of air that makes it out of the outer bin








Good enough for air exchange but also keep the humidity up...thanks to:








This is a big ziplock bag of water crystals I keep on top of the blankets in the outer bin. This was sort of an accident as apparently you dont need many crystals to soak up tons of water. I WAYYYYY overdid it.









For perspective:


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## loogielv

The lid is a DIY job I did. I just heated a kitchen knife and cut through the top easily, and then I found a sun screen in my backyard and cut that up and hot glued it to the underside.

















the glue job isn't nearly as bad as it looks here. I promise! 

Down inside the cavern:








Note the pretty clear crystals? There's too much in there too, but oh well. 

The bins I used for the crystals are just cheapo tin foil pans from Wal Mart ($1.57 for 4 i think.) 








I like them because they can bend and I can create easy access to and from the dishes.

The food is dry Kellogs oat bran with dehydrated strawberries mixed with dog food. The cereal gives the bin a nice sweet smell and theres no smell from the roaches to mention! :2thumb:

Just a quick shot down between the cartons:








I have too many cartons in there and I didn't want to pull one out and have to resituate it. Soon I'm going to remove one of the cartons. Then soon after that I'm going to build a new type of motel.









Oh no! it's only 16 degrees with only 16% humidity! Nah, it's just a cheap ass biscuit and the top lines dont show. it's actually 76 and 76! In a garage that's about 40 degrees and in a desert where the humidity is non existant! Also the thermometer is on the opposite side of where the reptile heater is, and the heating pad was off! I'm stoked about that!









This is a design of my own. It's a pretty small metal tube where I flattened one end of it so that way it could let medium and small roaches in, but i could dump the small ones out of the bottom and keep the mediums for feeders. I'm hoping the cold, smooth metal wont deter them from going inside it. I had just put it in about 10 minutes before these pics, so no roaches yet.

















The whole thing sits on the plastic bag that the girly blankets came in. 








That is to keep it off the cold concrete and also there's air trapped in the bag to act as even more of an insulator.

So what do you think of my setup? Any thoughts?

In the summer, i'm going to take out the blankets, and put fly paper on the bottom of the outer bin, so if any escape from the housing bin, they'll be stuck down there and i'll know about it. I'm also going to cover the inside bottom of the outer bin w/ foil, so if the heater ever does short out, it'll only melt the housing bin, and the foil will protect the outer bin so still no escapees!

On a side note, does anyone know if I can just rinse the water crystals when they get dirty? Is it dangerous (to me especially, but to the roaches too) to keep reusing crystals? Do the roaches have diseases that will rear their ugly head if I dont just throw out the used crystals or anything? 
Does not cleaning the bin for certain amounts of time generate health risks to myself or my family? 

Anyone know about keeping these guys with a pregnant wife in the house?


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## loogielv

3 DAYS LATER:

okay, slight update. I couldn't take the worrying anymore. I know that the chance of these under tank heaters melting the plastic is very slim. I also know that anything running 24/7 is bound to fail eventually. I can only hope that when these fail, they simply turn off, as opposed to shorting out and heating up to ridiculous temperatures. 

If that happens, the BEST CASE scenario is the bins melting and my house being infested with roaches. Sure they're tropical and all that, and there's a chance they can't breed w/o higher humidity than what we have here (Las Vegas NV, desert basically) but I just can't risk it. (Worst case is my house burning down)

So i started thinking that if I was to lace my outer bin with foil, it would reflect more heat into the housing bin, and also protect the outer bin in case of overheating. A pic is worth a thousand roaches....

This is what i had before under the housing bin. 








A UTH on the right, and a run of the mill, older human heating pad that I rarely would run for fear of overheating, on the left. 

I pulled those out and lined the bottom w/ foil









Here it is w/ the two heaters in place:


















Here it is w/ the housing bin back in place and the blankets folded alot neater and placed perfectly around the housing bin to insulate









I can see a few possible issues though...
One being, placing the heating pads on foil I know foil can take extreme heat, but will it retain heat and heat up the plastic too much? Or even worse, would it reflect heat back onto the heaters causing them to short or overheat? 
Is placing the heaters on foil a bad idea for any other reasons?


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## chesney

Wow, you've put so much work into that! I love the idea of having a variety of food for my darts, but I stand with your wife on this one...no roaches! How small are the babies and what are you feeding them to?


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## loogielv

babies are about the size of a really small pill bug maybe. I am going to feed them to a bearded dragon and the babies to some anoles. the only reason I haven't is because i'm waiting for the colony to take off a bit more. We'll see how it goes in the next month or so


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