>>All,
>>
>>I need some help with a situation. I have my cricket bin real close to my incubator and now my eggs have fruit flies all over them and maggots. I have some questions:
Those are not fruit flies. They are (if I am remembering the spelling right) phorid flies and they will usually start attacking bad or weak eggs first then go after the good eggs eventually. They often infest cricket colonies, feeding on the dead and weak crickets. Even if you get what looks like clean crickets, sometimes the crickets could be carrying fly eggs unknown to you until you later see flies hanging around.
Move the crickets as far away from your incubator as you can (other side of house, etc.) Then take whatever substrate you had the eggs on and throw it out and try to wipe down the eggs as best as you can before putting them on a new substrate. Pick through your crickets for the healthiest looking ones and save them. Throw the rest out. Clean out the cricket cage and scrub it down with bleach.
the flies like moisture and a cling-able surfaces and will lay eggs on that stuff. Don't give crickets water with a sponge to cling to (plus it promotes nasty bacterial growth). When using gel water, change it out every day with fresh clean gel. Don't try to wash and reuse the gel (some people do try that). People over estimate how much gel water needs to be used and put in far too much and try to make it last all week long, etc. I've learned with a group of a thousand half grown to large crickets you really only need to use about a table spoon of gel water each day... *if* they devour it all before half the day is over, you can supplement with a sliced up baby carrot or two. Small crickets, you can get by with about a half tablespoon. I still like to supplement with a little carrot.
Keep the crickets on a dry substrate such as newspaper or layers of paper towels with plenty of egg carton for them to climb on. Don't allow the paper / egg cartons to get wet..remember the flies like damp/moist environments. Over crowding and not enough places to cling to can lead to crickets dying from stress or getting cannibalized by other crickets causing the amount of fresh dead carcases to increase which will continue to attract the flies who like to lay eggs on them too. I find that cleaning out the cricket cage before adding a new shipment in helps a lot in reducing flies...for me that's about every other week. In between that I just try to scoop out any dead cricket debris.
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PHWyvern
