Easy Cricket Breeding Guide

[Raptor]

Everyone says that crickets smell, are hard to breed, and are loud. I can agree with the last statement, but not the first two. I've tried several guides on how to breed crickets. They're all complex and require a lot of work. Half the time, they just plain don't work. Tired of my lack of luck, I threw together something. I caught wild crickets and put them in a critter keeper with food and a jar of soil to lay eggs in. What do you know, the things bred and I got tons of hatchlings. So, here's an altered version of what I did. I'm doing this set up right now, and I already have crickets laying less than two weeks in.

Items:
10 gal tank
Mesh lid
Cardboard egg crates
Paper Towels
Cricket food (I use nature zone's gel cricket bites and flukers cricket quencher with calcium)
A lid (the lids that come with quicktrip cups are perfect)
A small container filled with dirt (non fertilized)
5 gal size UTH
Crickets

Clean out the 10 gal, put the paper towels in the bottom (two layers is good enough; it helps keep the crickets off the glass), and put the UTH under it. The UTH should not touch the glass. Ideally, there should be an area where the tank bottom is exposed to open air, so air flows under the tank. This prevents it from getting too hot and baking the crickets. Ideally, the paper towels should be warm to the touch. I put my UTH on the side where the egg crates are. Tear the egg crate into chunks and put it on one side, this makes plenty of hiding spots for the crickets. Put the small container with dirt beside the egg crates. Depending on the size of the container, you may need to put something in for the crickets to climb to get out. Eventually, the mature females will start laying their eggs in here. The soil needs to stay moist though.

Put the food dish with food in the center of the tank, and add your crickets. Ideally, the temperature will need stay in the 70s for the crickets to remain healthy and breed. Eventually, you'll see tiny little crickets everywhere. Don't worry about taking the egg container out. If you keep everyone well fed, the cannibalism should stay at a minimum.

Here's an example of my cricket set up:


Over winter, I lost my fairly successful colony of store bought crickets and wild black crickets. I was growing my F1s, too. My room got too cold and they went belly up. I've restarted the colony and hope to add some store bought crickets to get everything going. The reason for this hybridization is that the store boughts tend to be quieter, but lack the size and hardiness of the wild crickets. I also recently put a under tank heater under my tank to raise the temperature of one side. A temperature at about 86F will cause the eggs to hatch faster, 13 days vs 26 at room temperature.