by cascade » Tue Oct 29, 2013 6:12 pm
As Urucone said, to have more than one colony going is a good idea, One thing that happens when feeding directly out of your breeding colony, is that you wipe the population out before you know it.
If you are starting a new colony the best thing you can do is leave it for atleast 2 years before you feed from it.
I normally have a breeding colony and then a feeding colony, the only time I touch my breeding colony is when I remove half of the nymphs, juvies, adults and some of the males out to the feeder colony.
This allows my breeding colony to keep breeding and growing by "half"
The feeding colony also grows as they also breed but they get feed out of.
You need to do some calculations, If you end up feeding your beardie 10 roaches at a sitting, every day for a week you would feed off 70 roaches in one week in one month you would of feed off 280 roaches.
One female gives birth to between 20 to 30 nymphs, a females gestation period is about a month so lets say you get 30 nymphs every month from one female.
So you would need 10 mature female to give you 300 nymphs in one month but the roaches take 4 to 6 months to mature depending on the size you are going to feed off.
So at the end of the day you would need to have almost 3 times the amount of new roaches getting born than what you are feeding out.
Because you need 280 roaches as food, you need 280 roaches for next months feeding and then you need 280 roaches to grow your colony and you need to have the growth rate staggered eventually.
If you don't manage it properly you will end up wiping out your colony by over feeding.
I have seen people with 5000 strong roach colony and they wipe out a whole colony in a couple of months on 2 beardies and a couple of tarantulas.
It not exact science with my calculations, they don't drop all together at the same time, it differs, but it is more or less the idea and what to expected.