One thing leads to another..

[Wulfgeist]

So some time back I noticed this big praying mantis hanging out on the front porch. The temp is starting to drop here at night and I wondered what happens to these guys. Well I looked it up and it seems they must die off during the winter..either due to the cold or their life span. I felt kinda sorry for the lady so I brought her in, picked up a cricket keeper because petsmart was out of the other plastic box cages cept the wee one she wouldn't begin to fit in. Then I bought her some crickets. I could catch stuff for her to eat and I have managed to get a few things to her but as the weather is getting colder bugs are becoming a little more scarce. So then I had this crazy idea to ...raise my own crickets! Yeah sounds easy and rather inexpensive.

Now my luck will be that this will work (once I can figure out how to cat proof them), the mantis will die...and I will be stuck with all these crickets. Baby beardies are so cute...hmm...

:th_naughty:

[spiritbird]

I work at Petco as a nutritional consultant for another agency. They sell a lot of crickets. Hope the critter stays alive and will you give it a name?

[Turquoise]

How cute!! I love praying Mantis. :th_hug8: You should get a photo up on here of your lady.

Had a mantis egg blob (for lack of a better word to call it) I didn't know was there under a shelf by my heater once. How I found out it was there was when I started seeing all these tiny mantis running around my mantle & shelves. They were so cute & tiny. I managed to get them all corralled up & shooed out the door.

Crickets aren't hard to raise, but they are smelly and messy. I did raise my own for a short while when I had several lizards. I was not trying to raise them, they did that on their own when I put them in an aquarium to house as I used them for feeding. At that time I was ordering a large amount from one of the cricket sites.

[Feathers First Aviary]

Crickets are a huge pain to raise, if you're only feeding one mantis it really isn't worth it in my opinion. Even when I had tons of reptiles, it was more cost effective for me to just buy boxes of 1000 crickets every week or two than go through the hassle of breeding them myself. I did however breed my own mealworms. I was also just wondering, do mantises eat dubias? They are easy to breed, quiet and don't stink like crickets, just an idea.

[coltfire]

i breed crickets for my ewd's and in the end i had way to many once they start they are worse than rabbits (Breeding wise )in the end i just had to thin out the crickets as i could not get read of them quick enough.

[Blancaej]

Sounds like quite the project you have planned out. Have you started trying to breed the crickets yet?

[aliray]

If you still have the mantis I have a much easier way. As a young girl I use to catch one every year and keep it in the house and I use to take a very small blob of canned cat food and put it onto a toothpick like a shish ka bob. hold the mantis in one hand and gently wave the meat covered toothpick in front of them and they will grab it with their front arms while you sTill hold it and eat it like a mini ear of corn on the cob. Fun to do and fun to watch, and best of all no mess.. Alison

[Wulfgeist]

She (Queenie) passed on last week. I have crickets yet but yeah, raising them seems like a pain and they do stink. Alison I like the cat food idea. It's not like there's none of that at my house. I'll keep that in mind if it happens next fall.