RAWRchelle's Insect Breeding Guides: Dubia Roach Care and Breeding

The dubia roach is a great species to breed and offer as part of your feeder insect options. I began breeding them because I did not like crickets due to their smell and constant chirping. When choosing a roach species to breed dubia's were appealing given their inability to climb smooth surfaces, lack of flying capability and low chance of infesting. I will walk through my set up and care of these nutritious prey.

When setting up a dubia roach colony you will not only need to consider housing, but also a heat source. They require a warm and humid environment in order to breed and thrive. I use a rack that is set up with heat mats made of flex watt heat tape. I ordered the flex watt from Incubator Warehouse and followed the following video series to build the heat shelf. I connected the heat tape to a dimmer switch to give me the ability to control the temperature. You can find instructions to fit your needs online and on YouTube.

Here are pictures of my set up.

I use the sterilite 51Qt bins for my roaches. I order cardboard egg flats on ebay in bulk and use them inside the bin for the roaches to live in. I also cut the lid and hot glue screen to it for ventilation.

I leave one corner of the bin open and place a plastic lid in that location for the food. I feed them with various fruits and veggies along with a dry mix that I make myself from various dried fruits, nuts, alfalfa, seeds, rice bran and so on. I feed the colony a healthy diet for their entire life as this ensures they are very healthy when fed to my lizards and frogs. It is also important to rotate the items you are offering for food. I alternate between various greens, fruits, squashes, sweet potato, bell pepper, cucumber and so on.

Many people also use water crystals for hydration, however I do not. I have found that the fruits and veggies offer plenty of moisture and the water crystals are not needed. The fruits and veggies also keep the bin humid enough for the roaches to molt and breed.

I clean out the bin every 2-3 weeks. I find it easiest to have an extra bin ready so that I can just shake the roaches form the old egg flats in to the new bin. While I am cleaning and transferring the roaches over, I will also take this opportunity to separate out the sizes I need for feeding and putting them in smaller critter keepers, making it easy when it is time to feed my pets. I use two critter keepers, one with the size I need for my chameleons and one with the size needed for my frogs. To do this I use a stack of buckets that have holes drilled in them. Each bucket has a different size and they are stacked so that the largest size is on top. This way you can shake your roaches in to the bucket stack and the roaches will trickle down the buckets according to the size hole that they can make it through. The last bucket will have very small hole just big enough for the waste to fall through.