Cricket Breeding Question

[frogluver]

I’m new to breeding crickets. I have though successfully raised several batches of crickets over the past two months. However, the process of getting the crickets to grow to the appropriate feeding size (which for me is about ½ of an inch) is slow, about 3 weeks+. Is there a way in which I can speed up the process or mass produce crickets, so to speak?
The size of the cricket tank I use is 5 gallons and I keep the temp. at about 70-75 F. I also have an overhead lamp and a heating pad under the tank. I use moist coco fiber as the substrate and feed the crickets lettuce and carrot scraps.

[sajane]

warm them up . 90 degrees they grow pretty fast

[Sublime]

Raise the temps, throw some high protein dry cat food (This works really well, they devour the cat food I throw in there and get fat) in there or some specific dry cricket protein diet. Make sure there's not a lot of humidity in there from the coco fiber.

Oh and also you might want to turn on some Gaye Marvin - Lets Get It On song or Barry White to get the crickets really flowing.

[bruster]

I just got my first batch of baby crickets, at first I thought it was some other small bug until they jumped. I've been trying for almost a month. How long does it take for them to reach 1/8 -1/4 size?

[frogluver]

The crickets I have, under the conditions I described above, take about 2-3 weeks to grow to 1/8 -1/4 in size.

[bruster]

I didn't expect for 3 females to lay so many eggs. I thought I'd only get a few dozen, but now I think I have about 300-600.

[frogluver]

hehehehe....i thought the same thing when I first started to breed crickets !

[bruster]

I didn't even have them in there that long maybe 5 days

[Wolfx]

Do you remove the dead crickets?

[frogluver]

I remove any dead crickets that I find because they normally carry diseases that can infect healthy, living crickets. Not removing dead crickets would consequently result in a drastic decline to your cricket population.

[frogluver]

I didn't even have them in there that long maybe 5 days

It doesn't take that long for mature crickets to mate and lay eggs. I believe that the minimum time it takes is 48 hours. So you must have had a lot of egg laying within those 5 days.