Culturing Crickets - Care and Breeding of the Common House Cricket

[Paul Rust]

I'm thinking of breeding crickets. Do they smell bad though???

Yes they can smell really bad if you don't keep them clean.

For your cricket food recipe, what do you mean for the vitamin supplement? Is it like the RepCal powdered type reptile vitamins, or something else? Great article by the way, I've read a few for culturing crickets and this is the only one that makes me actually want to do it.

Mix something like Herptivite in with it.

Nice work Paul! This should be a great help to new cricket growers.

I'll add a tip that minimizes vacuuming up live crickets during cleaning- I put a heating pad under one side of my big bin, move all the furniture over to this side, wait a few minutes, them vacuum the other side. Rare is the cricket that stays on the bare, cooler side and risks vacuuming.

And tip to reduce escapees- crickets can't climb clear shiny packing tape, so I place a strip around the wall of my bins near the tops to keep surprises to a minimum when I open the lid. Vaseline works too, but this is cleaner.

And a note on numbers that might help those with less mouths to feed, I use ~2 dozen adults in my breeder bin and I've been hatching 400-500 pinheads.



At summer room temperatures here (16C-23C), it took 48 days from pinhead to my first winged adult (at least the first I spotted and I do check daily). It took 84 days for a full cycle, from pinheads hatching to becoming adults to laying eggs to these eggs hatching at these temps.

Thanks for the kudos
Nice tips also Thanks!