Waxworm Care Sheet

Ideal Temperature, Storage and Maintenance
Waxworms can be stored for a couple of weeks if kept at 55° F. This is the ideal temperature for waxworms; however, most refrigerators are a little colder than this. Often, the butter tray on the door of your refrigerator is the best place to find this ideal temperature. It’s better to keep waxworms at room temp with low humidity than it is to store them in a refrigerator that is colder than 40° F in its warmest area. Cupped waxworms should be stored in their cup. They have entered a stage in their life cycle where they no longer consume food. They are living off the fat supplies in their bodies. This means you’ll see them growing smaller the longer you keep them. Always remove any dead (black) wax worms from the container. It’s extremely important that they be stored in low humidity.

Superworm Care Sheet

Ideal Temperature, Storage and Maintenance
Superworms are tropical insects that require warmer temperatures than standard/giant mealworms. Superworms’ ideal temperature range is 70°- 80° F. Cupped superworms can be stored in the cups for up to two weeks. Bulk superworms will be shipped in a box with egg crate. Store your superworms in a plastic container with at least 2″ of Superworm bedding (Chicken Mash/Bran/etc.)  Good container guidelines for a superworm container include dimensions about twice that of a shoebox, at least six inches tall, without a lid, and of sturdy plastic construction. (Small cat pans usually work well.) Add a small amount of Potato every other day to provide moisture for the worms. Depending on the quantity of superworms, fresh bedding should be added every week to two weeks to maintain the 2 ½” layers. Plan on completely replacing the bedding every three to four weeks.

Cricket Care Sheet

Storage
Remove the crickets from the shipping box as soon as you get them. Keep the egg crates or partitions from within the shipping boxes to use within your own cricket container. These egg crates provide a climbing area for the crickets, allowing them to spread out, de-stress, and enjoy their new home.  Crickets ½” and larger need to be kept in an 18-20 gallon container that is at least 15″ tall. You’ll need a container that’s slick enough on the inside to prevent the crickets from climbing out. Also, crickets require a good amount of ventilation. If you use plastic tubs or aquariums as a cricket enclosure, don’t use a lid. Remove any potato used in the shipping box. Crickets don’t need bedding material; using it can actually harm their health and life span.

Ideal Temperature
The ideal temperature range is between 70°-75° F. Avoid temperatures above 80° and below 65° F. The cricket container should never be exposed to high humidity, direct sunlight, or cold drafts. Keep the container dry, and provide plenty of ventilation. Crickets shipped during cold weather might arrive looking dead; just release them into the container and allow them 3-4 hours to warm up. Cold temperatures can cause them to become dormant, but a few hours at room temperature usually perks them right up.

Food and Water
Always make fresh Food and Easy Water available in shallow containers. Keep no more than a two-day supply in the container at any time, replacing the supply of food and water every two days. Following this rule will decrease your cricket mortality rate.  Avoid fruits, vegetables, or a bowl of water, which can cause bacteria growth, increased mortality, and a bad smell.

Cleaning
Keeping the cricket container clean will ensure a longer, healthier life for your crickets. To clean the container, remove any dead crickets, shed skins, and waste material. Wash the container out with hot water (you can also use a very mild bleach solution) between cricket shipments. Thoroughly rinse the container and allow it to dry before adding a new batch of crickets. Never expose your crickets or cricket container to any kind of pesticides or cleaning solution other than a mild bleach solution.

Culturing Fruit Flies

Fruit flies are one of the easiest feeder insects to care for. Each 32 oz fruit fly culture includes all the food and water the flies will need for months. The culture will continue to produce flies for at least 2 months. Freshly Started Hydei Cultures will start to produce flies you can feed to your animals in 17-21 days. Freshly Started Melanogaster Cultures will start producing flies in 10-14 days. Each culture has the potential to produce 1000s of flies, but there are a few things that can slow down or stop production all together.

Humidity

Fruit fly cultures are prone to dry out in environments that are under 65% humidity. To maintain humidity, place the culture inside of a clear Rubbermaid container or storage shelving unit to keep the culture from drying out. You can also spray down the culture with de-chlorinated water if it dries out.

Temperature

Fruit fly cultures should be kept between 70 and 80 degrees. If the cultures hit 85 degrees even for a little while, the culture will go sterile and will not produce any more flies. Cultures that are kept under 70 degrees produce much slower.

Mold

Our 32 oz fruit fly cultures are made with a media that has a mold inhibitor already in it. However, if the culture begins to dry out, mold will appear on the top of the media. If mold develops on the top of the media, spray the mold down with some de-chlorinated water and put the culture in a clear Rubbermaid container or storage shelving unit to maintain humidity.

Mold will occasionally develop on the coffee filters or excelsior used in the culture. To prevent this from happening, make sure cultures are away from heater/air conditioner vents. If mold develops on the coffee filters or excelsior used in the culture, remove the portion with the mold on it before starting new cultures from that culture to avoid spreading the mold. Feeding from a moldy culture will not hurt your animals.

Mites

Mites are tiny bugs that love to attack fruit fly cultures. Mites are everywhere, so care must be taken to prevent mites from taking over your cultures. All cultures should be placed on paper towels that are sprayed with a Mite Spray. In addition, the area where the fruit flies are stored should be cleaned regularly.

If mites attack your cultures, it is best to toss all of your cultures and buy new fresh cultures.

Making Fruit Fly Cultures

Supplies:

1. Fruit Fly container and lid

2. Fruit Fly medium

3. Water free from Chlorine – Chlorine will slow the rate of fruit fly production. You can use distilled, RO, spring, etc.

4. Active Baker’s Yeast

5. Coffee Filters or Excelsior - Needed to create more surface area for more flies.

Procedure

Task	Tips	Pictures
Heat up 1/2 cup to 1 cup of water per culture you plan on making.	You do not need to boil the water. Just make it pretty hot.
Add 1/2 cup of media to each cup	My media has a mold inhibitor in it already so the vinegar is not needed.
Add 2/3 cup of hot water to each cup and stir	When your cultures start producing, if the media is runny, then use less water next time. If they dry out, use more water next time.
Wait for the media to cool	In a rush I put mine in the fridge for 5 minutes if I don’t want to wait
Sprinkle a pinch of Active Yeast on the culture (optional)	Do not put too much Active Yeast on your culture or your media will become soupy. We do not recommend using Active Yeast with our Hydei Fruit Fly Media
Spray the culture to activate the Yeast
Put in some coffee filters or Excelsior for the larvae and flies to climb	The number of coffee filters is dependent on your taste and humidity. Coffee filters absorb some of the moisture, so too many can cause your media to dry out and too few and your media will be soupy. With Excelsior, you will want to make sure that all the strands are out of the way of the lid being put on.
Add 50-100 fruit flies	For Melanogaster cultures, it is best to use flies from cultures that are just starting to produce. For Hydei Cultures it is best to allow a culture to produce for a few days to a week before starting a new culture with flies from that culture.
Immediately put the lid on your culture

Culturing Springtails

Supplies:

1. Container-I use large 5-6 quart clear Tupperware/Rubbermaid/Sterilite.

2. Charcoal

3. Starter Springtail Culture

3. Water free from Chlorine – Chlorine will slow the rate of production. You can use distilled, RO, spring, etc.

4. Springtail food

Procedure

Task	Tips	Pictures
Order a starter culture of springtails by clicking the “Online Store” link above	If you want the springtails to colonize in your tanks, just dump the culture in your tank or drain off some water from the culture into the terrarium.
Fill the Tupperware 3/4 full of charcoal and dump in the starter culture (you can also buy the charcoal by clicking on the “Online Store” link above)
Add food
Spray down the culture until there is 1/2 to 1 inches of water in the bottom of the container.	Humidity is the key. The springtails don’t need to swim, but keeping water in their container keeps the humidity up.
Put the lid on.	No ventilation is needed.
Every couple of days add food and spray down cultures as water evaporates.	Make sure the water level is not too high. The springtails will not utilize any of the charcoal that is under water.

Troubleshooting

Problem	Possible Solution(s)
Springtail culture stinks	Cut down on food
Springtails are dead	Make sure water is 1/2 to 1 inch deep. They will die if humidity is low. Make sure you are not overfeeding Check temperatures. Temperate springtails like a little cooler than room temp and tropical springtails need it at room temp or higher.

Surface area in Fruit Fly Cultures: Excelsior or Coffee Filters?

One of the most common variables overlooked in culturing fruit flies is the surface area used. I have seen cultures with everything under the sun used as surface area. The two most common sources of surface area in fruit fly cultures are coffee filters or excelsior. Each has their pros and cons.

For best results, coffee filters need to be folded so they look like pie slices. I will fold 5-6 together and push the point into the media. Coffee filters will absorb excess moisture in the culture media and therefore act as a moisture barrier, so they are less likely to dry out or become soupy. The downside to coffee filters is that they can get too wet and will collapse and bury the fruit fly media and hurt production.

Excelsior has been a long time staple in fruit fly cultures. It creates tons of surface area and takes less time to use (just grab a handful and throw it in the culture). The downside is that is quite messy to use as some of the fibers will inevitably fall out with the flies when feeding.

All cultures sold at Josh’s Frogs will be setup with excelsior, but our fruit fly kits can be ordered with coffee filters or excelsior.

Fighting Free-roaming Fruit Flies

The biggest (and most would argue only) drawback to keeping Dart Frogs is escaped fruit flies. There is nothing worse than feeling a fruit fly crawl over your arm or hear your guests comment on the amount of bugs in your house. There is, however, no reason for your house to be crawling with fruit flies no matter how large or small your Dart Frog collection is. Here is a list of a few things I do to keep down on loose fruit flies.

There is nothing worse than dropping a cup full of fruit flies and have them spill all over your floor. Keep a vacuum or shop vac near your tanks. If you have never dropped a cup of flies, don’t worry. You will someday.

Every time you feed your frogs your flies will make a quick dash towards your light and out every crack, vent, and crevice in your tank. For this reason, I have no vents on any of my tanks (they get air flow when I open them up every day). I also seal the none moving parts of my lids with silicon to keep flies from escaping (especially the aquarium lids that have the plastic back).

I also keep a glass of apple vinegar in my frogroom. The flies flock to this cup and quickly drown. I don’t like the smell of vinegar, so I only put an inch or so of it in the corner and change it weekly.

Finally, I allow free-roaming spiders to set-up webs by my tanks. I wipe away any webs that get in my viewing area, but I allow them to create webs out of plain sight.
If these steps are taken, you will find that you rarely (if ever) see any free-roaming fruit flies. Do you have any methods that I haven’t listed? If so, please shoot me a comment with your techniques.

Vacation

I have decided to do my own Blog. In this blog I want to talk about my take on the care of the poison dart frogs, discuss my take on new trends in the hobby, and talk a little about the business aspects of poison dart frogs and supplies.

I’m on vacation this week, so I wanted to talk a little bit about the hobby on vacation. The first aspect a dart frog keeper needs to worry about is making sure they have enough to feed their frogs when they are gone, but also enough to feed their frogs when they get back. A lot of hobbyists find themselves in the awkward position of not making cultures before they leave and coming back home to find that they are in a fruit fly crisis. I recommend that hobbyists order a few freshly started cultures two weeks before they are planning on getting back (so they are teeming with flies when they get back).

The Second aspect that needs to be taken care of is vacation feeding. There are many options out there, but I prefer to use the easy method. I just take a fruit fly culture, drill a hole in the side, and pop it in the tank. I use older cultures that are near the end of their life so that the frogs aren’t overrun with flies.

The final aspect is someone to care for your frogs. You need someone to check on and feed your eggs/tadpoles if you are going to be gone for more than a few days. In most cases they will need to check temps as well. If a cold front or a heat wave comes while you are gone, you could come home to dead frogs.