cab5392@

I keep both species. The dubias get vertical stacked egg crates, water crystals, and a myriad of food. Bananas, apples, bread, rabbit food, my own dubia feed mix. The red runners are in a shoe box at the moment with a piece of egg crate, same diet. I have 30 some egg casings but no nymphs yet. I clean both colony containers out once a month and keep the frass in a container with egg crate to sort out nymphs and buffalo beetles that get left in the frass. Edit:was going to link pictures but the file size is too big.

Unless you live in a region that is warm and humid all year infestation isn't a problem with dubia. Any that escape in my house die within a few days, especially being winter.

I do have under tank heat, this is probably what happened. That is a very good point about CO2 build up as well, I did notice most of the roaches on the egg crates were fine, but all of the ones on the floor were already dead or twitching and not walking correctly.

Do you think off-gassing could severely affect a healthy dubia colony as well? I just made a post about how I covered the screen to increase humidity for a SINGLE night, and it just about devastated my breeder colony bin when I found it the next morning. Hundreds were twitching and couldn't crawl, which led to a slow death. There are never many dead in my colonies, and cleaner beetles usually take care of the corpses, but there was frass build up in the bottom of course. Maybe ammonia or some form of decomposition of frass could have caused the issue?

I learned a lot from this thread. From the beginning when I started my colonies (dubia and red runners) I was going by the information I had found regarding keeping their protein percent low to avoid uric acid issues. I have always mainly fed oats, grains, and supplements like bee pollen, but have had wing nips in my Dubia colony. I may try a higher protein diet with their usual vegetable offerings and grains included and see how they react.

Hello, this is my first post on these forums. As some foreknowledge, I have had a flourishing Dubia colony for 7 months now. I did my first separation about a month ago from large-adult dubia in one bin, and all other size nymphs in another. The enclosures have heat pads and screen ventilation lids. Now for my massive mistake, humidity in my house is very low because of it being winter. I wanted to increase the humidity in my cage and get a reading overnight if I had put a board over the colony's screen ventilation lid. I checked the next morning, and a massive number of bugs (from my valued breeder bin of course) were laying on the ground twitching and listless, and everything in the enclosure was soaked. I won't be making that mistake again, but I am more curious as to what caused the issue, whether it be ammonia gas let off, or something else triggered by the massive humidity. I pulled all my adult females from the bin as they are the foundation of my colony and separated them into a clean bin with the usual ratio amount of males, but I am still finding more females that are walking poorly and twitchy. All in all I'm upset that I've lost 100 some of my female breeders, but is there anything i can do to help the twitchy ones or keep more from perishing?