Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have some questions and am hoping someone can help. First off a little info. I ordered an established colony of 1000+ mixed sized Lobster Roaches the end of May of 2003. I have them housed in a 60 quart rubbermaid bin, with pine shavings and egg flats (cut in half and like sides glued together), along with paper plates for food. I have the bin placed on top of one of my bearded dragon cages for heat.

It has been almost 2 months since I bought them and they have at least doubled or even tripled their numbers! Now I need to clean and seperate the bin up some as they are outgrowing the bin, I dont want to over crowd them too much. My questions are:

1. Whats the best way to clean the bin?
2. Any suggestions and/or tips to prevent escapees?
3. Should I keep younger ones seperated from adults, to start another breeding bin?
4. Do I have to worry about inbreeding with roaches?
5. How on earth do I get the roaches off of the egg flat housing I made, without losing any or making a big fuss or mess? (I will include a picture of egg flats down below)

Picture Taken When Lobsters First Arrived

Also I would like to start buying a couple more species of roaches to get the colonies well started so I can have a constant supply of different feeder roaches for my 9 bearded dragons daily (or at least every other day). If you dont know alot about beardeds, I will say they eat ALOT. So I am guessing I am going to need at least 3 different species, maybe 4. The lobsters help, in that they are very prolific, but even so they cant keep up with my eating machine beardies.

What other 2-3 species of roaches would be best? I would prefer non climbers and of course flightless as well. But I would need them to be among the faster producers.

Another off topic question I have is, does anyone know how to tell the difference between male and female lobster roaches? I feed my beardeds the adults (winged ones) and I would prefer to feed more males off then females, but I cant tell the difference. This could be cutting down my colony size quite a bit. Thanks for any help you can offer. I think I asked all the questions I had. If I th ink of any more, I will post them.

OH! Also where can I get the different roach species for a good price. The bigger the starting colony, the better! Thanks, LindsayMarie

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>>1. Whats the best way to clean the bin?

I don't know as I have only done this once and with fewer roaches. I sorta did it like I do crix..... bang out the egg crates and take out the dishes,
shake 'em down to one end with all the bedding, put the egg crates back and let all the roaches flock to them. Pick through the bedding and take it out and replace it.

>>2. Any suggestions and/or tips to prevent escapees?
Do it in the bathtub?

>>3. Should I keep younger ones seperated from adults, to start another breeding bin?

Don't know. When I divided mine I just divied them about equally and left it at that. But I don't know if this it 'best'.

>>4. Do I have to worry about inbreeding with roaches?
Nope

>>5. How on earth do I get the roaches off of the egg flat housing I made, without losing any or making a big fuss or mess? (I will include a picture of egg flats down below)

With hissers I have to pick them. But the lobsters knock off like crix.

DO post back with what works and what doesn't with what you do. That way maybe we can all figure it out.
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Sonya

Man, i had no idea i had that many hissers. I would estimate i have at least 750 full grown adults, and many juvies and babies.

I basically went throught it in the the following mannor:

I get an empty garbage bag in the can, and then im ready. I leave all the egg flats in there, and use a 16oz dixie cup to pick up the substrate. I make it a point not to get adults in the cup. They are big enough to avoid. I shake the cup over the garbage bag slowly, only letting a bit out at a time. If i se a baby, i stop and grab it up. if not, i empty the cup and start again. It is messy and a little slow, but it works well, I doubt i lost a baby. Then it was time to replace the egg cartons. My hissers can be "coaxed" off of the eggflats by banging the flats against the wall of the enclosure. I do this until there are no more passengers and then throw it in the garbage .... repeat till no more egg flats. then i dump in the pine shavings, to calm the roaches down a bit. When they are burried, they are not as hyper. Then I put the new egg flats in as I desired. Total time to clean out a 22 gal rubbermaid tote was 1 hour, 20 minutes.

When done, take the garbage outside. you dont want that funk inside, and just incase you missed 1 or 100, they wont find their way in your house.

Hope this helped.

PS. I have only had these hissers for 4 months, and I have atleast 1500 of various sizes, from a starting group of 60. I guess im doing alright in care for them. I can probably start feeding them off now, as they are at the point of exponential growth.

Truth

My worry with shaking the egg flats against the side of the bin is that they are almost as tall as the bin and its one big unit (glued together). I worry that the lobsters might flutter up and out when being hit against the sides, and or will start flipping out and scampering up the sides of the bin and I accidently crush them. Lobsters are so much faster then hissing roaches and quite a bit smaller. The babies are 1/8" if that so would be extremely difficult to pick out of the pine shavings.

I was thinking I could buy another bin or two and somehow transfer all the adults to one of the new bins and slowly transfer the babies to the same new bin or 2nd new bin as the babies grow to a size thats easily picked up. It would be time consuming, but would decrease the chances of losing some during cleaning.

Im not really sure how I am going to do this project! I thank you both for the different ideas. I am thinking I am going to clean it the beginning of august. So I have a little more time to come up with some ideas.

My biggest concern is how to get all the roaches off of the egg flat unit I made! That is going to be hell. Especially the tiny babies that are not easily seen.

Thanks, Lindsay

How about if you have enough room you make two stacks of egg flats for them to hide in. The one that is glued together and another one that you can bundle together with string or something easily removed when you need to take layers apart. Then put the heat source over the side with the bundle of egg flats (the one that can be easily unstacked). So they all go to that side. I never tried it but it's worth a shot.

I would suggest making egg flat stacks that you can easily take apart though for cleaning and transfering purposes. That or just place the flats vertically at an angle in the container with each lying on top of each other slightly so your roaches don't get crushed between flats.

Here is a link to a website that has several species of roaches for sale.
Roaches of The World

I ransferred my eggs crates with all the adults to a new clean container. Leave just one egg flat in the old cage. Every night I pick-up that egg crate and kock the babies in the new cage. I also then spray some water on the bottom of the egg crate and more flock to the water, then I dump them. You can also hold off food and water for a few days, then stick a slice of orange on a paper plate. when they flock to it you dump them. I think I remeber warning you about these lobsters. They arn't the easiest roaches to deal with. I probably had 10,000 babies in my container. I have also just let them babies grow and then picked them out as they got older. They are by far the hardest species of roach to clean. One other hint: I am quickly realizing less is more. Put in much less subtrate and they will stick more on the crates. Good Luck,
James

I breed several different roach species and the lobsters and by far the most prolific, but the discoids probably are the most prolific by weight, and the giant caves are also pretty good. I have tried the hissers and the orange heads, and they both suck, at least in my experience.

When one of my bins starts to get a little dirty I take all of the adults out and start new colonies, and leave the babies. It almost seems like that actually starts to clean the cage up a little, maybe because the litter dries out more, but any way once a week or as needed I go in and take out all of the new adults out so I don't have any more new babies, and eventually there will be nothing left in the cage. This of course takes a long time to complete, but there is no way that I will sort out thousands of tiny babies from the litter. I hope this helps, and I hope that you are still reading this, but if you have any more questions email me at Hacker@ezwebtech.com as I do not frequent these forums.