Feeding Rice Flour Beetles and Worms

Amarok815

Arachnopeon
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May 4, 2017
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Anyone fed their smaller slings rice flour beetles? I'm sadly allergic to roaches, so I started to look around at other food options to prepare cultures for slings I plan on ordering (hard to choose with all these amazing species!) and found rice flour beetles. Being only around 4-5mm max as larvae, I was thinking of using them to add a little variety to a mainly fruit fly diet most smaller slings have.

Also are some worm species poisonous to tarantulas as they are to darts? I was planning on having a large setup of a ton of cultures for any tarantulas I get to feast upon and earth worms would be fairly easy additive (currently got superworms, mealworms and crickets are next). Can I just get the regular red wigglers and colonize those?
 

Venom1080

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Sep 24, 2015
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ive read that slings should not be raised on a fruit fly diet alone. not enough nutrients. prekilled crickets and mealworms are by far superior.
 

johnny quango

Arachnoknight
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May 17, 2013
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I actually use waxworms for slings they tend to fatten them up fairly quickly. Some members tend to use them post moult but I don't see an issue using them whenever I feel like it. I try to have a collection of feeders including waxworms, locusts, crickets and even sometimes calci-worms. I also only use roaches on the odd occasion as many of my tarantulas won't even entertain the idea of eating them
 

Amarok815

Arachnopeon
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May 4, 2017
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ive read that slings should not be raised on a fruit fly diet alone. not enough nutrients. prekilled crickets and mealworms are by far superior.
I would definitely be trying pre-killed first! I was thinking about going with a dwarf species (love Cyriocosmus elegans and C. leetzi) and I hear they're sometimes no other option than to feed fruits flies until big enough to take others. My only worry is having a picky sling and no back ups.
 

Venom1080

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I would definitely be trying pre-killed first! I was thinking about going with a dwarf species (love Cyriocosmus elegans and C. leetzi) and I hear they're sometimes no other option than to feed fruits flies until big enough to take others. My only worry is having a picky sling and no back ups.
get pinheads and chop them in half for the absolute smallest
 

Amarok815

Arachnopeon
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May 4, 2017
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I actually use waxworms for slings they tend to fatten them up fairly quickly. Some members tend to use them post moult but I don't see an issue using them whenever I feel like it. I try to have a collection of feeders including waxworms, locusts, crickets and even sometimes calci-worms. I also only use roaches on the odd occasion as many of my tarantulas won't even entertain the idea of eating them
Would wax worms be small enough to feed a dwarf sling? I was already going to start a culture, so that would be awesome if they could just take those. My current culture wish list is: horn worms, crickets, wax worms and possibly earth worms. I have leopard geckos that would be willing to eat anything that grows too big for a dwarf.
 

johnny quango

Arachnoknight
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May 17, 2013
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Would wax worms be small enough to feed a dwarf sling? I was already going to start a culture, so that would be awesome if they could just take those. My current culture wish list is: horn worms, crickets, wax worms and possibly earth worms. I have leopard geckos that would be willing to eat anything that grows too big for a dwarf.
Yeah waxworms are fine to use for any sling of any size. All my slings between 1-2" get live waxworms as they actively take them some even tong feed with them my Avic metallica for instance. Any sling under 1" gets the choice of live or cut up like a mealworm some at this size will take live once they realise that they can handle them. Even some of my adults will take them also
 

D Sherlod

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Dec 30, 2016
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By culture I assume you mean breeding your own....

If so for crickets I hope you have lots of ventilation..... because wow do they stink!!!
 

Amarok815

Arachnopeon
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May 4, 2017
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By culture I assume you mean breeding your own....

If so for crickets I hope you have lots of ventilation..... because wow do they stink!!!
Yes, sorry I'm a fish person and culture is used a lot in that realm.

They do stink! I've had little mini cricket setups from when I would get 200 counts for $1.50 (just came in a bag) and found that regular cleaning kept the stink at bay.
 
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D Sherlod

Arachnoknight
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Dec 30, 2016
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Yes, sorry I'm a fish person and culture is used a lot in that realm.

They do stink! I've had little mini cricket setups from when I would get 200 counts for $1.50 (just came in a bag) and found that regular cleaning kept the stink at bay.
When I was breeding geckos I would buy 2 and 3 thousand at a time .... I would go thru them in 2 weeks
in warm weather you had to be really careful ,, when a couple die the off gassing can kill a whole tub of them
the smell is intolerable.
 

Amarok815

Arachnopeon
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May 4, 2017
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When I was breeding geckos I would buy 2 and 3 thousand at a time .... I would go thru them in 2 weeks
in warm weather you had to be really careful ,, when a couple die the off gassing can kill a whole tub of them
the smell is intolerable.
Wow, thats a lot! I'd probably only want about 60 regularly producing adults at a time for my needs.
 

D Sherlod

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Dec 30, 2016
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If that's all you need ,,, just buy them.
With crickets I don't think there is any such thing as small breeding project.
 

Amarok815

Arachnopeon
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May 4, 2017
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If that's all you need ,,, just buy them.
With crickets I don't think there is any such thing as small breeding project.
I wish, but around here they don't have pinheads available and shipping them out would be okay until winter. I can still use about 50 pinheads to feed my pond fish once a week and any extra adults will quickly become gecko food. I may have a friend or two with pac man frogs that will take extras too.
 

Nixphat

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Oct 8, 2016
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I have two feeders so far in my 6 months or so of keeping. I colonized mealworms using this link:
http://mytutorlist.blogspot.com/2011/08/how-to-start-mealworm-colony.html

Mealworms are really easy to colonize, it just takes a couple months to get them going. What I did was bought a 100 count container of small mealworms (from petco or your local petstore), let them grow, pupate and turn to beetles. I let them go for a little while and now I have WAY more mealworms than I know what to do with, all of varying sizes. (While I waited for them to colonize, I just used large mealworms and crickets)

I also have a kritter keeper and buy the plastic container of crickets from the petstore. I put some peat moss (or whatever substrate you've been using) down at the bottom for them to have some ground to walk on, and then just add cardboard egg containers for their shelter. I will say that using the cardboard egg cartons that come with the crickets from the store often smell pretty bad... but the lower number of crickets make it easier to check in every few days, removed who died, add carrots and etc.

But this has just been my experience thus far :happy:
 

Amarok815

Arachnopeon
Joined
May 4, 2017
Messages
23
I have two feeders so far in my 6 months or so of keeping. I colonized mealworms using this link:
http://mytutorlist.blogspot.com/2011/08/how-to-start-mealworm-colony.html

Mealworms are really easy to colonize, it just takes a couple months to get them going. What I did was bought a 100 count container of small mealworms (from petco or your local petstore), let them grow, pupate and turn to beetles. I let them go for a little while and now I have WAY more mealworms than I know what to do with, all of varying sizes. (While I waited for them to colonize, I just used large mealworms and crickets)

I also have a kritter keeper and buy the plastic container of crickets from the petstore. I put some peat moss (or whatever substrate you've been using) down at the bottom for them to have some ground to walk on, and then just add cardboard egg containers for their shelter. I will say that using the cardboard egg cartons that come with the crickets from the store often smell pretty bad... but the lower number of crickets make it easier to check in every few days, removed who died, add carrots and etc.

But this has just been my experience thus far :happy:
Thanks for the link! I actually have a couple meal worm and super worm cultures going on, but I love the "alien" container idea!! I'll be stealing that concept and trying out tomorrow. ;)
 

beaker41

Arachnoknight
Old Timer
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May 23, 2012
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I've tried feeding adult flour beetles to slings but never got any good results, the larvae are probably easier for a small sling to take. Seems like the adult beetles are a bit much for small slings to bite through. The other issue I had is they tend to burrow and make themselves hard to find.
 
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