Problem with crickets.

I'm noticing a trend with my crickets. I buy about 30 at a time for my leopard gecko and something is not right. I keep them in a medium/large cricket keeper and feed them Flukers all in one food as well as the cricket food. They have the egg crate to crawl on and such but for some reason, they are dying off and fast. I just recently bought this bunch of crickets a few days ago. I keep them on the floor in my bathroom (because my cats would get to them otherwise) and they are mostly in the dark.

Its only been a few days and HALF of the crickets are dead and stinking up my bathroom. I'm wondering what could be the problem. I've never had this many die on me within a short period of time. My grandmother sometimes goes into my bathroom to clean and uses a bleach solution to clean. The fumes of this can be very strong sometimes, but she has not cleaned recently and there was at least a weeks span between her cleaning and getting the crickets, so I don't think its that. Could it be ants? I do have a small ant problem (see one or two every so often in the bathroom) but I don't think they are in masses that could kill off over a dozen crickets in a matter of days. I'm really confused and frustrated. Crickets are not cheap!

Too hot or too humid for them maybe? I always found if we let the apartment get too warm and humid they would all die although we never found them too pricey...

(Then again we buy from a breeder who sells and would ship them to our door for 18$ per 1000 total (Canadian not american $$)).

You should look around and see if anyone does anything like that in your area... It saved us a bundle!

does the flukers have calcium? calcium is great for gut loading, but it kills insects in high doses. so for maintaining a living population for a bit, don't feed crickets calcium

The new flukers food is high in calcium but this was the first time using it. I had another batch of crickets die off (about 3/4ths the amount) a week or so ago and at that time I was not using the new diet. I will hook a thermometer/hydrometer up in the bathroom tonight when I get home from work and get an accurate measurement and post it up here.

I've bred crickets myself in the past and your problem is most likely the heat. Bathrooms hardly ever have ventilation, and in the summer especially it gets really warm in there. The last batch of crickets I bought (which is the LAST since I'll be switching my leo to exclusive worms) died off really fast because of the record high heat we've been having here.

My :2cent: , based on past experiences and the great info I've gotten here, is to try and switch to a non-cricket diet. Crickets are just more trouble than they are worth :)

I want to keep to a cricket/worm diet. Chibi loves chasing the things around and it gets her moving instead of her just crawling out of her hide to eat from a dish.

I will try keeping them in a more ventilated area. Not sure how thats going to go because I have cats and the cricket keeper is see through. My cats will want to knock it over. I'll figure something out. I'm still going to test the temp in the bathroom tonight though to see if thats really the problem.

Well I got some crickets yesterday and got rid of the old ones and so far no dead crickets. I checked the temp and humidity in the bathroom. Temps range between 71 and 76. Humidity was around 50%, sometimes less. The crickets I got yesterday are from a different store so I'm crossing my fingers.

Oh, and another question. I've kept crickets before and have never heard them make that chirping noise until now. Does this mean that they are trying to breed? Or do they make that noise just because its warm in the bathroom?