Take your plastic box, for example a faunarium like this:

and put some kitchen towel at the bottom, like so:

This is important to absorb humidity, and also allows the crickets to comfortably walk on the bottom. They can't get a grip on plastic surfaces so they won't be able to climb out. You will need a lid for the adults though, they can fly and it's just a precaution to stop escapes.

Fill the box up with egg crates stacked vertically so that droppings fall to the bottom. You need to leave at least 10cm of space between the top of the egg crates and the top of the box, or else they will jump out. Use a jar lid for the food dish and put this and the water dish at the bottom.

For the hatchling box where pinheads are housed, you need to keep the kitchen towel substrate wet, but not so wet that there is any standing water. You should use 3 or 4 layers of kitchen towel so that it takes longer to dry out. Here's how a hatchling box looks

After a week you can add a water dish and allow the substrate to dry out. This is really important to have a wet substrate for pinheads because they dehydrate very quickly and die if they don't have high humidity! Pinheads will eat the same powdered food as adults, so you can give them a dish of food when they start hatching.

For the box with adults, add a laying tub. Take an empty butter tub or similar, and fill it up with damp compost, and make sure to pat it down so that it's not loose. You need to check it every so often to make sure it doesn't get too dry.

This is how the adult box should look like:

The adult box should be somewhere else that is cooler, about 22-25C. This is to extend their lifespan and allows them to lay more eggs.

Boxes with adults need to be cleaned out about once a week. Boxes with pinheads up to mid-sized crickets don't need cleaned, and it's not easy to clean them when they are this small anyway. When they get near adult size is when you need to replace the kitchen towel substrate and egg crates regularly.

 

Ideal foods include instant oatmeal, powdered fish food and chicken mash. Any powdered animal food is fine. Check the bag and note the protein % of the food you're using. Oatmeal is usually about 10%, fish food is usually 45%. So, to make it 30% protein, you need to mix them together by weight. Here's how to do it:

Multiply the protein of food A by the number of parts you think you will need, and add this to food B which is also multiplied its protein percentage by the ratio you think you will need. You then take that total and divide it by the total number of parts you have.

So if you have fish flakes 45% protein and oatmeal 10% protein, let's try a ratio of 1:1 (2 parts in total)

(45*1) + (10*1) = 55, take this and divide by 2 because we have 2 parts total, so 55/2 = 27.5% protein.

Not bad, but we could make it closer to 30% if we try another ratio. Let's try 3:2 fish food:oatmeal.

(45*3) + (10*2) = 155. We have 5 parts in total so 155/5 = 31% protein.

You can use as many different foods as you like. So if you wanted to use fish food, chicken mash and oatmeal, you'd just add more parts. Chicken mash is usually 15% protein. So, if we have a ratio of 1:1:2 fish food:chicken mash:oatmeal this comes to about 30%. Experiment until you get the mix you want!

After you have your ratio, just mix up some food. A good starting amount might be 500g. So for the first recipe you'd mix 300g of fish food with 200g of oatmeal.

You need to make sure the food is powdered so that all sizes of crickets can eat it. You can easily crush up fish flakes by putting some in a plastic food bag and use a rolling pin to roll over the bag and grind up the flakes.

 

Adult crickets need about 4cm2 of floor space each. So, a plastic faunarium like in the picture measuring 35cm x 20cm x 25cm would house 175 crickets, if nothing was in the box. If you add egg crates, you can fit more in because there's more surface for the crickets. So, say you add 20cm x 10cm of egg crates, you add this to the total area and divide by 4 (space needed per cricket) to get how many you can fit. So this comes to 35*20 = 700, plus 20*10 = 200 added together is 900cm2 of total space, divide by 4 to get 225 crickets. If you overcrowd more than this, there's a high risk of cannibalism so I recommend you stick by this rule

Smaller sizes of course have smaller space needs so you can fit many more in the same size box. Here is a table of the sizes of cricket and space they need with the empty faunarium as an example box.

 

Size of cricket	Space per cricket	Faunarium will hold
Pinhead (1/16”)	0.25cm²(0.1”² )	2,800 crickets
1/8”	0.5cm²(0.2”² )	1,400 crickets
¼”	1cm²(0.4”² )	700 crickets
3/8”	1.5cm²(0.6”² )	465 crickets
½”	2cm²(0.8”² )	350 crickets
5/8"	2.5cm²(1”² )	280 crickets
¾”	3cm²(1.2"² )	230 crickets
Adult (1”)	4cm²(1.6”² )	175 crickets

 

Temperature for all sizes below adult need to be 30C(86F) for maximum growth rate. Adults need to be kept at room temperature, 22-25C to live longest.

At a constant temperature of 30C, eggs of the black cricket hatch after 8 days, silent crickets after 9 days. It takes 5-6 weeks for the nymphs to reach adult size.

Adult black crickets live for 6 weeks, silent crickets for 12 weeks. You should replace the breeding stock after 5-6 weeks to keep young laying crickets in and old non-layers out.

Black crickets lay 30-50 eggs per week each, silent crickets lay 20-30 per week. Every 150 females needs a laying box of 10cm x 10cm so just add more laying boxes if you have loads of females.

 

To start off the breeding colony, buy a lot of SUB-ADULT (one size down from adult) crickets, depending on how many you want to breed. Don't buy adults because they are old and will die off too soon. It will take about a week for the first lot of sub-adults to moult into adults and begin laying. You should have more females than males, extra males can be put in the spare box and used for feeding. The ratio should be about 1:3 males:females. Make sure food and water is always available, and remove moulted skins and dead crickets every other day, or every day if possible. This will only take a few minutes. If you slack on this, it gets dirty very fast and I find it weakens the colony and you will end up with mass die-offs.

After one week and most of the crickets have become adults, give them the egg-laying tub. Spray the laying tub if it begins to look dry. It MUST be kept moist, but not wet, at all times. You might want to count how many males/females you have to make sure you get the numbers you are looking for.

A week after you put the laying tray in, put in a freshly prepared one and take out the old one and place that in a new hatching box prepared as described in the rearing box section. It will take 2 weeks to hatch all of the eggs and then the laying tray can be filled with new substrate. The pinheads should start hatching a few days, up to a week, after you take out the laying tray. They only eat tiny amounts so only feed a small layer of food in their jar lid. The important thing is to have more surface area of food so that the tiny crickets can find it, so have a few jar lids of food scattered here and there in the box, and only put in a sprinkle of food that covers the surface of the jar lid. The food becomes too hard from the heat after 2 weeks but by then it should be all eaten anyway if you measured it out right.

After another week, there will be a swarm of pinheads in the hatching box. Now take out the laying tray from the old hatching box and put it in a new hatching box, along with the laying tray that was just in the breeding box. You will now have two laying trays full of eggs in the new hatching box and one (the third) freshly prepared tray in the breeding box. Make sure you have numbered them so you can keep track.

This is basically the routine you need to follow each week:

Take out the two trays from the current hatching box, putting one into a new hatching box and replacing the laying material in the older one and re-using it for the breeders (by then all of the eggs have hatched). This lets you keep all the sizes separate, which is extremely useful and also important to the crickets to minimise cannibalism.

Five weeks after you got the first lot of sub-adults, you will need to buy another lot to replace the ones that are now dying off/finished laying eggs. You can either put these into the 5-6 week old growing box and pick out the breeders yourself, or put them all in the breeder box then take out the excess males when they mature. It is probably better to put them in the 5-6 week box and pick out the biggest crickets as they mature a week later, and put those into the breeder box. So after 6 weeks you will have a new set of breeders and all of the old breeders are now in the feeder box. You should also take out the old and dying crickets, and the ones with split ovipositors, because they are no longer laying eggs and therefore they are useless as breeders. Use them as feeders or something.

By week 7 the first hatchlings will now be adults so they can replace the old breeders. They will be in the 5-6 week box by then. This is when you just have to take them all out of the box and put them either in breeder or feeder box. Again before you put the fresh breeders in, take out all of the old ones and put those in the feeder box. The cycle is now complete and you can follow a routine to maintain the colony. Breeders need to be replaced every 5 weeks, so on week 6 do this change.

Make sure you label each box so that you know who is in what.

 

Just so that everything is crystal clear, I'll take you through what exactly you have to do each week, starting from the very beginning:

Week 0: Get fresh breeders (5 week old crickets or sub-adults), set up box G for them.

Week 1: Breeders now mature, give them a fresh laying tray (#1)

Week 2: Take out laying tray #1 and put it in a freshly made plastic hatching box (A) Give the breeders a new laying tray (#2)

Week 3: Take out laying tray #2 and put it in a freshly made plastic hatching box (B). Put laying tray #1 from box A to box B as well, since they are still hatching. Give the breeders a new laying tray (#3).

Week 4: Take out laying tray #3 and put it in a fresh hatching box (C). Now take laying tray #1 which has now finished hatching, and replace the substrate. Then put it in with the breeders in box G. Take laying tray #2 from box B and put it in box C along with laying tray #3.

Week 5: Take out laying tray #1 and put it in a freshly made hatching box (D). Put laying tray #3 in box D as well. Replace the substrate in laying tray #2 and give this to the breeders in box G.

Week 6: Take out laying tray #2 and put it in a freshly made hatching box (E). Put laying tray #1 in box E as well. Replace the substrate in laying tray #3 and give this to the breeders.

Week 7: Take out laying tray #3 and put it in a freshly made hatching box (F). Put laying tray #2 in box F as well. Replace the substrate in laying tray #1 and give this to the breeders.

Week 8: Now the first hatchlings will be adults and ready to go to the breeding box. Take out the old breeders and put them in box H (used for holding feeders). Clean out box G then put the new breeders from box A into box G. Take out laying tray #1 and put it in a freshly made hatching box (box A now cleaned out). Put laying tray #3 in box A as well. Replace the substrate in laying tray #2 and give this to the breeders.

Then repeat the cycle, remembering to take all of the crickets out of the box for 5-6 week old crickets and separate them into either breeders or feeders, and then clean out their box. Basically, each batch is in the same box from hatching to 5-6 weeks old, then they are moved to either breeders or feeders. It might get dirty but as long as you keep it dry and remove dead crickets then there shouldn't be a problem. Feel free to clean out their box, but my point here is to try to keep time and work to a minimum.

Comments? Questions? If you found this guide helpful, please E-mail me! or send a PM to 'ladybird' on Reptile Forums UK

 

Q: There are tiny white dots in the laying box, are they hatching crickets?

A: If they are tiny round 1mm dots, they are mites. Usually mites are not a problem because you're never keeping the same substrate in the laying box for more than 2 weeks, but if you find there are more than just a few, consider freezing or heating the substrate before adding it to the laying box. If you have a really old bag of compost that has dried out for a long time, it should be free from mites. So drying works too.

Q: How do you sex crickets?

A: You can sex them from about large size up to adult size. By the time they are about 2cm long, the females will have a dark spike appearing at their rear-end, this is their ovipositor. In adults, it's about 2cm long and very obvious! Males don't have an ovipositor at all. Males are also the only ones that chirp.

Q: How do you count lots of crickets?

A: Live food factories use a cup, or measuring jug and measure out crickets in volume, and estimate the numbers from that. So they give you say, 500ml of crickets in a bulk bag. It's not a good idea to do this though, if they are in the cup too long they die from all the humidity of being on top of each other after a few minutes! I'd recommend doing it this way if you have too many to count individually, or just do it by eye and guess how many are there.