adventures in bulk cricket keeping

[swinginuttersgrrl]

I ordered my first bulk crickets last week and have got to admit that the convenience is nice, but I think I'm doing something wrong. The large crickets make a ton of moisure in their tub and the resulting mush of dead crickets and goodness knows what else that has built up on the bottom of the tub in a week is appaling and disgusting and I honestly don't know what to do to make the situation better. I cleaned the whole thing out, transferred the live crickets, changed out the egg crate and swabbed up all the nastiness but would like to know how to prevent this going forward. My hsuband is hung up on drilling holes in the tub lid, but I'm worried that I'll end up with a bunch of crickets in the house, is this a valid fear or if the holes are small enough should it work? Any advice from those who keep large numbers of crickets would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
~K

 

[T-ReXx]

How much ventilation do you have? Crickets need quite a bit. I would screen out the entire lid. Use metal window screening, they can chew through the nylon stuff.

 

[tlbowling]

It does sound like you need ventilation. I cut out 2 large squares in the top of my lid, and then cut out the screens that came from the sides of the box of crickets, and duct taped them to the top, works well, and no escapees I'll try to find you a pic. and if I can figure out how to post it for you I will.

 

[Pokersnake]

I hate crickets. With a passion. Stinky cannibalistic chirping monsters. However, critters like to eat them.

I had the same problem in my small cricket keeper even though there was ventilation. I had to go so far as to make sure my water pillow didn't have any extra moisture on it before putting it in the cage.

 

[Mel&Keith]

We use really large rubbermade tubs that are tall enough that they can't escape. That way we don't have to worry about a lid and moisture building up. Do you have them on any sort of substrate? That might also help.

 

[swinginuttersgrrl]

i put paper towels in there yesterday just to catch the sludge since it was NASTY having to wipe it up after the fact... I'm gonna have to rig up some screeing i guess since I'm not comfortable with the idea of just drilling holes like husband wants to do. The place I got them from said to put them in a storage tub but never mentioned anything about ventilation so I figured that since they're little they didn't need more than what air gets in through the ege of the lid - oops - thanks for clearing that up for me! I'll fix it right up later today (good thing I still have the extra shipping box they sent with the order (I tossed the gross ones but thought i might use the clean empty one, guess I was right!)

thanks again
~K

 

[Imperial Geckos]

Here you can take a look on how I keep my feeders, the first half is on crickets.
Video: How We Keep Our Feeders

Hope this helps! :main_thumbsup: