13 replies to this topic

[ZllGGY]

So about a week ago i got my Green Banana Roaches, Panchlora nivea, and they are a nice small sized soft bodied roach that i plan to feed to young colonies who can't quite use a dubia yet and also future pets. They're currently housed in a large critter container with a coco fiber substrate for digging as they are a digging roach species. I also have two pieces of cork bark in their enclosure for them to hide under while they eat their food. They are known to be good flyers while i haven't seen that  so can't tell how well they truly fly. Currently at work so i don't have any pictures to show but will post some later tonight when i get the chance. Hope this colony does as well as my dubias are doing right now.

Edited by ZllGGY, March 21 2018 - 8:09 AM.

[Dnail]

how long will it take for roach to be use as food?

[ZllGGY]

how long will it take for roach to be use as food?

well newborn nymphs are extremely small so id assume if you could find them in the substrate you could use those for small species, they take about 100 days to go from nymph to reproductive adult and have an overall life span on average of 20 months. So any stage of their life cycle really because they are a much softer bodied roach i plan on owning a chameleon in the future so i'm breeding these little guys as part of that future en devour.

[Dnail]

 

how long will it take for roach to be use as food?

well newborn nymphs are extremely small so id assume if you could find them in the substrate you could use those for small species, they take about 100 days to go from nymph to reproductive adult and have an overall life span on average of 20 months. So any stage of their life cycle really because they are a much softer bodied roach i plan on owning a chameleon in the future so i'm breeding these little guys as part of that future en devour.

 

i mean to make roach "farm" so they have stable supply of "food ant"

[ZllGGY]

 

 

how long will it take for roach to be use as food?

well newborn nymphs are extremely small so id assume if you could find them in the substrate you could use those for small species, they take about 100 days to go from nymph to reproductive adult and have an overall life span on average of 20 months. So any stage of their life cycle really because they are a much softer bodied roach i plan on owning a chameleon in the future so i'm breeding these little guys as part of that future en devour.

 

i mean to make roach "farm" so they have stable supply of "food ant"

 

oh i see what youre saying. i guess that depends really on how many adults you get in your shipment but id say that around the 4 or 5 month mark is probably a good start to thinking about using them as feeders but its an equation of almost all variables so just depends on how you keep them

[ZllGGY]

These are the images i was able to get i will get some better quality ones as i was kinda rushed when taking these

 

 

The adult roaches are a lot more skittish than the babies as they always seem to run and burrow when i move the cork bark to look at them

[antnest8]

cool i wish my parents will let me breed insects.

[ZllGGY]

cool i wish my parents will let me breed insects.

honestly roaches arnt that bad. both dubias and banana greens are non pests species so they can't really invade your house, and they don't smell bad compared to crickets. If you ever find yourself being able to keep some let me know i can probably help you out.

[antnest8]

man but their still bugs my parents barely let me keep ants. even then it's only my mom who really allowed it and my dad won't come into my room anymore

[ZllGGY]

Been a really long time since i updated this journal but i guess nothing much has happened with the colony except a really big baby boom as when ever the cork bark is lifted they all scatter as fast as they can back in their tunnels. Can't really see much since they all burrow and hide in the ground most of the time. The babies definitely do make good starting colony food sources as they are only about 2mm long maybe.

[Major]

Are there any points in there growth? Like ants have the arrival of majors, alates, growth spurts, getting ready for hibernation, things like that. Does any big stuff happen with roaches? I’d love to keep them but my family would be disgusted. My little brother has tried to eat my queens before, so it’s hard to hide my ants from my siblings. I think it would be harder to hide roaches from my brother since they are bigger. He’s two so that’s why he tries to eat anything that moves. There’s no way I would ever come back home and see my roaches safe. I don’t wanna endanger lives so I won’t get them.

[ZllGGY]

with these roaches i noticed a distinct spike in feeding activity a week or so back and so my colony started out with 100 roaches of mixed ages and then a lot of the matures died off so i assumed they were all just at that age. now though i believe that the count is at about 250 based on the number of tiny baby roaches i see when i lift their cork bark (i estimate that the babies are about 1mm long when first born and the adults only reach about 1.2cm to 1.5cm with the females being bigger). with your brother there are ways to secure your drawers and areas that you keep your insects in. i keep mine in my closet for the moment but i don't have little ones to worry about. i do plan however to open some sort of insect zoo and house everything that i would ever own their so i supersede the issue of babies getting into my bugs

[Major]

Lol yeah. Now I just caught some myrmica and if he gets into that... That would be painful.

[ZllGGY]

you could always child proof the door XD but will give another update to these soonish, possibly a video update.