The Precise and Practical Guide to Breeding Black Crickets (Gryllus bimaculatus) and Silent Crickets (Gryllus assimilis) By Ladybird

If you can't afford to be constantly buying crickets for your animals then breeding them is a good way to save money. This is especially good when you have lots of small animals that need pinhead or small crickets. Be aware that it takes time and dedication to keep a colony of crickets running smoothly and efficiently. They need a small amount of attention every day, and a larger amount of attention once a week. You will also have to wait a while to get the colony established (8 weeks) Unless you are willing to buy in all the sizes to get it started, this way you won't have to wait more than a week or two to get it established.

This is the method I have personally used to raise crickets and so far, it works. I've noticed a lack of good guides out there on the internet on how exactly to breed crickets, so I've decided to make this one and share it with you. Good luck!

What you will need:

• 8 Jar lids
• 8 Plastic party cups
• Egg crates, egg boxes, cardboard tubes etc. for climbing places
• Paper towels
• Brown tape
• 8 (initially) Cardboard wine or crisp boxes or similar sized cardboard boxes and a steady supply thereafter
• 3 plastic food containers 1.5”-2” deep and about 6” long by 4” wide, for laying trays
• Compost or peat moss
• Chicken feed (the powdered laying mash) and/or animal food pellets
• a spare cupboard or closet that will fit 7 stacked cardboard boxes
• a heater with thermostat to keep a constant temperature of 30C-33C(86F-91F) inside the cupboard/closet
• Last but not least, the stock breeder crickets to get things started

The boxes are set up like this at the start: (UPDATED - I have had to switch around the lettering because of the new method)

(plastic) Box A – 0-1 week old crickets

(plastic) Box B – 1-2 week old crickets

Box C – 5-6 week old crickets

Box D – 4-5 week old crickets

Box E – 3-4 week old crickets

Box F – 2-3 week old crickets

Box G – 6+ week old breeders

Box H – 6+ week old feeders. This box should not be kept in the heated cupboard/closet in order to extend the life of the feeders.

The basic setup consists of a heated cupboard (try to insulate the cupboard to minimise heat loss and therefore save you money). Use a heater that will heat the air temperature of the entire cupboard and keep it at a constant 30C-33C(86F-91F). This is the temperature that will get the fastest growth and reproduction out of the crickets. You can stack the boxes so space shouldn't be much of an issue.

This is how each box is set up:

To make the water dish: Pierce two holes in the plastic party cup near the rim.

Fill it with water. Put the jar lid on top and turn the whole thing upside down, the water will pool in the jar lid.

To make it safe for the crickets, get a piece of paper towel and roll it up into a long thin piece.

Then wrap this around the bottom of the party cup. Press it down so there are no gaps.

This is the water dish. The water dish needs to be washed and re-made every week for crickets older than 2 weeks, and once a week after 2 weeks for hatchlings, unless it dries out, then you will have to refill it anyway.

To prepare each growing box: Get your cardboard box.

Line the inside top of each box with brown packaging tape to create a barrier to stop the crickets from climbing out.

Line the bottom of each box with paper towels taped down. Make sure there are no gaps!

Use some egg crates for climbing places and also to put the food. Put a scoop or two of food in the dimples in the egg crates. Black crickets prefer dry food, but silent crickets will enjoy fresh food as well as the dry food, but fresh food is optional.

To prepare the hatching box: One of your boxes will have two egg-laying trays where the pinheads will hatch out. Put one egg-laying tray at either end of the box, and the water dish in the middle. Sprinkle a small amount of chicken mash around the base of each laying tray.

UPDATE! I have found a more successful way to hatch crickets and have a minimal mortality rate. Instead of a cardboard box, use a plastic storage box of about the same size and set it up as follows:

First, clean out the plastic box and put about 4 layers of paper towels on the bottom. Pour water on the paper so that it is damp but not too wet (there should be no standing water). This needs to be kept moist at all times, but the thickness of the paper towels should hold the water for a number of days. You should check it every day just in case and add water as needed.

Next you need to make up a water dish just like before and put this on the bottom. Also have a jar lid with some dry food, and put some fresh food in too. Fresh food like dandelion leaves will last longer in here because it is so humid. Only put a small amount of food in this box since the hatchlings only eat tiny amounts. The last thing is to add the egg tray with the hatching eggs.

Something else important is to leave the lid with a gap of a few inches in order to allow the box to ventilate.

I have found this way to be much more successful than hatching crickets into dry cardboard boxes. The most important thing is to keep the humidity high, but not wet because they will drown in any standing water. Ventilation is important because it stops mould from developing on the food.

You will need to have two of these plastic boxes instead of cardboard for boxes A and B. I will explain later what to do with them.

To prepare the breeding box: One box will be used for breeding adult crickets. Set up as before but this time, put in one egg-laying tray as well. To prepare the laying tray, get moist compost or peat moss and fill the tray to about 1” deep.

The feeder box will be set up the same as the growing boxes. Don't give them a laying tray.

The breeder and feeder boxes should be replaced every 3 weeks. Just throw out the old ones along with all the egg crates, and prepare new ones.

Basic info for crickets:

Feed:

Foods that crickets will eat include oatmeal, chicken mash, fish flakes, all kinds of pellets, fresh foods include wheat germ, apples, carrots, lettuce, oranges and dandelion leaves.

Their dry food should be 30% protein for optimum productivity. You can make your own mix if you know the protein percentages of the food you are using. This is labelled on most foods like chicken laying mash and fish food. Mix the foods with a ratio that will give a final mix with 30% protein, for example:

if you have fish food that is 45% protein and oatmeal that is 10% protein, you should mix them with a ratio of 3 parts fish food to 2 parts oatmeal, which will give you a protein percentage of 31%. You work it out by trial and error with the maths until you get close to 30%, like this: Multiply the protein of food A by the number of parts you think you will need, and add this to food B which is also multiplied its protein percentage by the ratio you will need. You then take that total and divide it by the total number of parts you have. I'll show you so you know what I mean:

fish food 45% protein, oat meal 10% protein. Let's try a ratio of 1:1 of fish food:oatmeal (which is two parts in total)

(45*1) + (10*1) = 55, take the answer and divide by 2 since we have 2 parts in total, so 55/2 = 27.5% protein

we can make it closer to 30% if we try another ratio. Let's try 3:2 of fish food:oatmeal

(45*3) + (10*2) = 155, we take this and divide by 5 since we have 5 parts in total so 155/5 = 31% protein.

Now you should understand how to do this. You can use as many different foods you want, so you could have fish food, chicken mash and oatmeal in a ratio of say 1:2:5, as long as it gets to about 30% for the final mix. The mix that I use is chicken laying mash 15% protein, oatmeal 11% protein and fish flakes 47% protein mixed in a ratio of 1:1:2 to give 30% protein. A good amount to start would be to make up 400g of food, so for my recipe it would be 100g chicken mash, 100g oatmeal and 200g fish flakes. This should last a number of weeks.

You should also use powdered food since all sizes of crickets will eat this, so it makes it more convenient. You can easily grind up fish flakes in a plastic bag using a rolling pin until it is a fine powder. Instant oatmeal and chicken mash are already powder, so you can mix them together as it is.

Housing and space requirements:

Adult crickets need a box that will give them 4cm²(1.6”²) of floor space each. So a crisp box like in the picture measuring 40cm x 30cm x 30cm (16” x 12” x 12”) will house 300 adult crickets. You can increase this by adding egg crates. Just add the measurement of those onto the surface area of the floor to calculate how many crickets you can house in the box. So adding a total egg crate measurement of 40cm x 30cm (16” x 12”), the same box will now house 600 adult crickets. Of course, the space requirements for nymphs is proportionally less. I've made a table to help you work out how many will fit in your boxes. Basically, you multiply the width by the length of your box and divide this by the space requirement per cricket of the size of cricket you are housing if your box has different measurements to mine.

Temperature: 30C-33C (86F-91F)

Development times: Black crickets: eggs hatch in 8 days, nymphs fully adult in 5-6 weeks. Silent crickets: eggs hatch in 9 days, nymphs fully adult in 5 weeks.

Lifespan of adult: Black crickets: 6 weeks but they only lay eggs for the first 3 weeks. Silent crickets: 12 weeks but again you should refresh the breeding stock after 3 weeks.

Eggs laid: Black crickets: 200-300 in lifetime (30-50 per week) so:

Silent crickets: 250-350 in lifetime (20-30 per week) so:

Mortality rate of growing hatchlings to adult is about 50% so the expected number of adults for black crickets would be:

 And for silent crickets it would be:

Getting Started

To start off the breeding colony, buy a lot of SUB-ADULT (one size down from adult) crickets, depending on how many you want to breed. Don't buy adults because they are old and will die off too soon. It will take about a week for the first lot of sub-adults to moult into adults and begin laying. You should have more females than males, extra males can be put in the spare box and used for feeding. The ratio should be about 1:4 males:females. Make sure food and water is always available, and remove moulted skins and dead crickets every other day, or every day if possible. This will only take a few minutes.

After one week and most of the crickets have become adults, give them the egg-laying tray. Spray the laying tray if it begins to look dry. It MUST be kept moist, but not wet, at all times. You might want to count how many males/females you have to make sure you get the numbers you are looking for. If you are only after pinheads then use the table for number of eggs, but if you want to grow crickets more than 3 weeks old then use the table for growing to adult.

A week after you put the laying tray in, put in a freshly prepared one and take out the old one and place it in a new hatching box prepared as described above. It will take 2 weeks to hatch all of the eggs and then the laying tray can be filled with new substrate. The pinheads should start hatching a day (or two for silent crickets) after you take out the laying tray. They only eat tiny amounts so only feed a small layer of food in their jar lid. The food becomes too hard from the heat after 2 weeks but by then it should be all eaten anyway if you measured it out right.

After another week, there will be a swarm of pinheads in the hatching box. Now take out the laying tray from the old hatching box and put it in a new hatching box, along with the laying tray that was just in the breeding box. You will now have two laying trays full of eggs in the new hatching box and one fresh tray in the breeding box. Make sure you have numbered them so you can keep track.

This is basically the routine you need to follow each week:

Take out the two trays from the current hatching box, putting one into a new hatching box and replacing the laying material in the old one (by then all of the eggs have hatched). This lets you keep all the sizes separate, which is extremely useful and also important to the crickets to minimise cannibalism.

Three weeks after you got the first lot of sub-adults, you will need to buy another lot to replace the ones that are now dying off/finished laying eggs. You can either put these into the 5-6 week old growing box and pick out the breeders yourself, or put them all in the breeder box then take out the excess males when they mature. It is probably better to put them in the 5-6 week box and pick out the biggest crickets as they mature a week later, and put those into the breeder box. So after 4 weeks you will have a new set of breeders and all of the old breeders are now in the feeder box. You should also take out the old and dying crickets, like the ones with split ovipositors, because they are no longer laying eggs and therefore they are useless as breeders. Use them as feeders or something.

By week 7 the first hatchlings will now be adults so they can replace the old breeders. They will be in the 5-6 week box. This is when you just have to take them all out of the box and put them either in breeder or feeder box. Again before you put the fresh breeders in, take out all of the old ones and put those in the feeder box. The cycle is now complete and you can follow a routine to maintain the colony. Breeders need to be replaced every 3 weeks so on week 4 do this change.

Make sure you label each box so that you know who is in what.

Just so that everything is crystal clear, I'll take you through what exactly you have to do each week, starting from the very beginning: NOTE due to my update on hatching crickets into plastic boxes, this changes the method slightly because you have to move the 1-2 week old crickets out of the plastic hatching box into a cardboard growing box. I've changed the method below because of this.

Week 0: Get fresh breeders (5 week old crickets or sub-adults), set up box G for them.

Week 1: Breeders now mature, give them a fresh laying tray (#1)

Week 2: Take out laying tray #1 and put it in a freshly made plastic hatching box (A) Give the breeders a new laying tray (#2)

Week 3: Take out laying tray #2 and put it in a freshly made plastic hatching box (B). Put laying tray #1 from box A to box B as well, since they are still hatching. Give the breeders a new laying tray (#3). Buy more 5 week old crickets to replace the breeders next week. Put these in box H for now until they mature next week.

Week 4: Take out laying tray #3 and put it in a fresh hatching box (A). You will need to remove the hatchlings that are in box A already and put them in a new cardboard box (C) prepared as described for growing boxes. Then clean out the plastic hatching box A and replace the wet paper towels and put in the laying tray #3. Next take out all the old breeders, and replace box G with a fresh one. Then put the newly matured breeders in the new box G. Put the old breeders in box H, the spare box for crickets to be used for feeding. Now take laying tray #1 which has now finished hatching, and replace the substrate. Then put it in with the new breeders in box G. Take laying tray #2 from box B and put it in box A along with laying tray #3.

Week 5: Take out laying tray #1 and put it in a freshly made hatching box (B) and take out the crickets first as described for week 4, putting them in newly made cardboard box D. Put laying tray #3 in box B as well. Replace the substrate in laying tray #2 and give this to the breeders.

Week 6: Take out laying tray #2 and put it in a freshly made hatching box (A), taking the crickets out first of course and making a cardboard box for them (E). Put laying tray #1 in box E as well. Replace the substrate in laying tray #3 and give this to the breeders.

Week 7: Take out laying tray #3 and put it in a freshly made hatching box (B) and put the existing hatchlings in a new box (F). Put laying tray #2 in box F as well. Replace the substrate in laying tray #1 and give this to the breeders.

Week 8: Now the first hatchlings will be adults and ready to go to the breeding box. Take out the old breeders and put them in box H (which should now be a fresh one). Also replace box G with a fresh one, then put the new breeders from box C into box G. Take out laying tray #1 and put it in a freshly made hatching box (A). Put laying tray #3 in box A as well. Replace the substrate in laying tray #2 and give this to the breeders.

Then repeat the cycle, remembering to take all of the crickets out of the box for 5-6 week old crickets and separate them into either breeders or feeders, and then discard their box. You have to get one new box every week to make the first cardboard growing box each time. Basically, each batch is in the same box from 2-3 weeks old to 5-6 weeks old, then they are moved to either breeders or feeders. It might get dirty but as long as you keep it dry and remove dead crickets then there shouldn't be a problem. Feel free to give them a new box, but my point here is to try to keep time and work to a minimum. And make sure you discard and replace the breeder and feeder boxes every 3 weeks to keep everything nice and clean.

Comments? Questions? If you found this guide helpful, please E-mail me!

how to breed crickets breeding crickets raising crickets black crickets silent crickets