How much does your Beardie cost per month for care?

[allergenic]

EDIT - what package should i purchase?

As many as you can afford. The more you purchase, the faster your colony will grow and be ready to start feeding off males.

And do I need to buy that starting package and that chow and water crystals, or can I just buy the roaches and feed them normal stuff and give them regular water?

The water crystals are a good way to provide water to your colony, but buying them from roach sites is a racket. You can get a 5 lb bag on eBay for next to nothing.

Roach food is another racket, the ingredients are also not listed since the sites generally don't want you to easily replicate it (which you can, easily). Providing your own food is much easier.

The other issue with not knowing the ingredients of the roach food is, well, not knowing the ingredients. For some reason it was thought that a roach colony needs insane amounts of protein (they don't), so people feed their roaches garbage like ground up dog and cat food. Remember that what your roaches eat, your dragon eats. Do you want your dragon to be eating dog and cat food?

The roaches need a well balanced diet with starches, carbs, and protein. An easy way to accomplish this is to provide ground up alfalfa pellets as well as rolled oats (ground up or not). There is surprisingly a great amount of clean protein in both. Make that, water crystals, and fruits and veggies (bananas, apples, carrots, etc) available at all times.

With a plan like this, gut loading is not necessary as your roaches will already be full of clean food.

Hope that helps.

[allergenic]

An easy way to accomplish this is to provide ground up alfalfa pellets as well as rolled oats (ground up or not). There is surprisingly a great amount of clean protein in both.

Sorry, I meant to add that any local farm/feed store usually has 50 pound bags of either, for less than $10-$15. That will last a year or two.

[PurplePython]

thanks for the info! glad a few of you guys took the time and offer your advice to me.

[Crazy4Herps]

thanks for the info! glad a few of you guys took the time and offer your advice to me.

Good luck with breeding them. Dubia are awesome!

[ls1goat04]

mine is over 100 bucks a month. i cannot stand crickets, they stink and climb and die to fast. i feed pheonix worms. my beardie loves them. but eats alot of them. over 100 worms a day. they are low in fat, very high in calcium. you dont have to dust these at all. works good just hurts the wallet

[Foschi Exotic Serpents]

WAY too much considering I feed mostly pheonix worms supplimented with crickets. I cant wait til this guy is on mostly greens.

[maverickgtr]

My juvenile beardie [~11 months old] doesn't really eat that many crickets. Maybe a dozen a day. But he won't eat them every day if we offer them. He almost prefers his veggies. We've started giving him freeze-dried meal worms, and he loves those to the point of picking them out first, then sitting on his branch to bask after about 10 minutes he'll come back down to eat anything else we offered.

We were thinking of trying silkworms. Has anyone here tried those?