I have my wire top for my 10 gallon aquarium made and it fits really tight. I am going to use cut-up cardboard as bedding. I have a heat lamp with a 120 watt heat bulb (it was the smallest I could find). I don't know what I am going to do with the caulking in the corners. Someone recommended that I rub them in vaseline once a week. Does this work. Please, anybody, let me know what I am doing wrong or what I can change. I want to be completely prepared before my beetles arrive.
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to give them a light spray with water about every other day.
You might want to experiment with just a few bugs under that lamp. I kept a bunch of my bugs in a an old camp cooler, I put in a 100 watt regular light bulb with them and it fried everyone of them inside of an hour. Maybe the heat bulbs work differently but I would test it out first before you poor the whole colony in.
Mine are in glass aquariums with screen tops and a 60 watt bulb, newspaper shredded for bedding, i mist 2x a day ( morning and night) make sure they are fed. dont use dry dog food (risk of mites) use table leftovers if you do not have and meat or hamburger. do not use skulls cured outside (other bug infestation) i have had my colony 2 months and almost tripled in size. and are in the basement at 62 degrees. they cant fly if not over 70 degrees.. hope it helps
It is not recommended using a light bulb for a heat source. If you are using a heat lamp I'm betting you will have fried bugs the first day. Even if you raise the lamp up high, heat lamps are very reflective and radiate heat a long way.
Read any book on the subject and you will see it is recommended to use a Reptile heater or a Heating Pad. I use a heating pad under a 10m gal. tank on low setting and it is kept at a comfortable 68deg. If the bugs get up to 80deg. the adults will fly. Keep the humidity around 50%. Use a humidistat / thermometer inside the tank to keep track of their climate. Too high of a humidity will invite mites and too low will dry them out. Lower is better than high. Spray once a day on the food/ feeding tray. Do not spray the bedding if you can help it. Use a cover that you can control the opening to regulate the humidity.
Take a razor blade and cut the silicone off of the top 4 inches of the tank and make sure you get it perfectly clean. This will prevent the larva from climbing out. The remaining silicone will act as a gauge to how hungry they are. If your bugs need more food they will crawl up the silicone looking for food. The more bugs that crawl up, the hungrier they are.
Start out with small amounts of food, an eaten chicken leg at first, then another. Move on to bigger items as the colony grows. Put the food in a plastic or tinfoil container, plate, pie pan on top of the bedding material. Make sure to pile some bedding material up the edges of your container so they can get in. When spraying water in for the day, make sure to spray the food also.
Give them somewhere to bore into and nest. Preferably a chunk of Styrofoam. The kind used in packing electronics. They will bore into it and make a happy little home.
That's pretty much it as far as starting a colony. You can go from 50 bugs to 1000 it a few weeks. You should have enough bugs in 3 to 4 months to start cleaning skulls.
Good Luck,
Jim F.
Nature's Art Taxidermy Studio
water bed heater. There are several makes and all have thermostats. I agree on not using a light. My bugs scatter when I turn on the lights in the bug room.
Do I have to put the reptile or heating pad in the tank or just underneath it? I am getting around 500 bugs (a mix of adult and larvae) if that means anything. Keep the advice coming, I am learning a lot. Thanks.
is what I have. You can get the waterbed heaters cheap on ebay but they may be bigger than what you need. My boxes are big for Elk, Moose & Buffalo.
You need to put the heater under the tank. Sandwich it between a board and the bottom of the tank. Start out with it on low and monitor the temp. adjust it to keep it between 65 and 75. too low and the bugs will not eat and too high and they will try to fly. And don't forget to keep the humidity around 50%.
Like Randy said, when you go bigger for larger skulls you will need a larger heater and a water bed heater is perfect.
Have fun with them, they're actually quite interesting to watch.
Jim F.
I have a large colony of Madagascan Hissing Cockroaches as pets. Yes, very odd, but I'm a zookeeper (currently disabled and off work). I ended up with them because my relief keeper cleaned out the spoiled food one day and threw out about 30 infants that were attached to the lettuce.
I have about 300 roaches in various sizes in a 35 gallon tank. A very fine mesh, sliding and locking lid top, with orchid bark, potting soil substrata. Optimal temp is 68-71 degrees. I do have over tank lighting which is about 2 feet above the tank. It's a full spectrum fluorescent tube. I use a heating pad that sticks to the underside of the tank that I purchased at a pet store. This supplemental heating pad is only used during the winter months and is on a timer.
I have a humidity/temp stat on both sides of the tank. The tank is long enough to give them a heat gradient. If I notice most of them on the cooler side of tank I know something is up with the heating pad. Half of the substrate is missed every other day along with one wall of the tank. They also have a very shallow water bowl filled with flat rocks to prevent drowning. The water bowl helps to maintain the humidity level at around 50%. Any high than that I develop mold on the substrate. I rub Vaseline on all the seams and 3) from the top. As they crawl up the glass the drop as soon as they hit the Vaseline. This has kept them all in now for over 6 years.
I guess this would work for any beetle type insect. Am I too far off in housing should I have the need to maintain dermestids? We also have lizards and raise our own crickets. I keep a shallow bowl filled with damp cotton balls as a breading medium for them. Vaseline is also used to keep them in their tank and prevents them from eating the silicone on inside corners of the tank.
Lucy