Tools Used
Insect Pooter
An insect pooter is a tool used by entomologist to suck up small insects into a container. This is the only way to capture a pinhead cricket from the floor. To make a pooter, start with a plastic vial like a pill bottle (I use a 2 liter preform) with a lid and 2 pieces of plastic hose (Linear HDPE or Polyethylene or Vinyl). One is ¼ “ outside diameter, the other should be a little larger (5/16”). Drill holes in the cap of the vial so the hoses insert snugly. Over the 5/16 hose attach a filter, like panty hose or similar breathable material, on the end that goes inside the vial. This is what prevent stuff being sucked into your mouth. Once assembled, put the end of the 5/16 into your mouth and place the end of the ¼ near the item to be sucked up. Draw a vacuum (as in suck) and the item will end up in the vial.
The picture shows one that uses a 2 liter preform as the bottle. It is practically unbreakable but harder to obtain. An extra piece was added to the mouth end as a bite piece. Menards has the tubing.
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Transfer cage shield
Since crickets are excellent horizontal jumpers I added a shield around the tub the crickets are dumped into. I started by making a wood collar to sit atop the bin. Then I cut some thin acrylic to attach to the inside of 3 of the sides of the collar. The plastic is high enough that should a cricket jump it hits the acrylic and falls into the tub. To decrease the impact of the crickets falling while being transfer I added a piece of acrylic that was bend do so the crickets that hit it slid into the box and only drop a few inches at a time. This may be unnecessary but it was a simple task to do. A heat gun for stripping paint was used to heat the plastic for bending.
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Scale for weighing
Needed to weigh ELBs, food mixtures, and production results. A must have kitchen gadget for me.
Use a standard electronic kitchen scale that can read in 1 Gram increments. Nothing in this process requires a higher precision. I attempted weighing some pinheads only a few days old using a more accurate scale. Although it read to .01 grams resolution, this was not accurate enough to use the count by weight feature of the scale. Each pinhead weighed less than .01 grams. 50 newish pinheads weighed .30 grams. This can vary immensely, they grow fast.
Sieves
Common kitchen sieves are invaluable. I use multiple screen sizes, based upon the need. Walmart has an expensive set. One should be fine enough to hold tea leaves.
-They can be used to separate the frass from the discarded exoskeletons and larger pieces of food and crickets that stay in the mix. The crickets can be move out easily.
-The cocoanut husk is passed thru one to be sure it is broken up and remove some of the strands.
-When dusting with sulfur, the sieve guarantees the sulfur is a fine powder as it tends to clump.
-When grinding the dry cat food, pass the food thru a sieve and reprocess what does not pass. What passes can be run thru a finer sieve and what come thru is powder is and is great for pinheads.
One of the screens used is actually a screen dome used to keep flies off food when outdoors. It was a chance find at Aldi. The mesh is approx. 1/8 inch and is rigid. It is the best sieve for coconut husk and the first step after the food is ground for the first pass.
Dry Erase Markers
These are used to temporarily label dates on each cricket containers. One date is the date the cage was cleaned. The second date is an estimated date the crickets should be ready to be given away. If the date should accidentally be erased, place a 2nd estimated final date inside the box. The incubation cage has only the date it was started.
The breeding cage can be dated as to when the breeding was started as a reminder when to replace them
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Plant Marker and Extra Fine Point Sharpie
The ELB must have an indication as to the day they were placed in the breeding cage and the sequence for this group of breeders. I found plastic markers at a garden store sold for labeling seedlings. After the ELB is finished the marker is washed and used again. Put a line thru the old information. They last for years.
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Brush for Cleaning Cages
I found a brush at Walmart made for cleaning tires on a car. It is large with soft bristles and a handle so the brush does all the work. This exact model is no longer sold and models vary from year to year.
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Water Supply Devices (I call them Waterers)
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These devices I feel are what enable me to raise so many crickets. Crickets grow faster if there is an available water supply. However, they have no fear of water and will drown if the water is deep enough. I have also noticed massive die-offs, particularly in adults, if their cage bedding is too moist for too long. In essence, the waterer device consists of a container of water over a base that maintains an appropriate level of water.
The basic setup consists of a base with a shallow well, or depression, cut (milled) into it. Two screens of different sizes are placed into the depression. Then, an inverted water bottle or pill vial, with a hole in the cap, is placed over the screens. Water trickles into the depression until an equilibrium is established.
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Before I get started, I use both metric and SAE measurement in these instruction. There is a reason why. My drilling tools and material stock pieces are in SAE. When it comes to cutting or drilling to a depth, metric is far easier to manipulate.
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Details about the pill-vial-style waterer
great for small crickets or other insects
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The individual components are shown above. The base is made of a thick waterproof material, ½” Plate HDPE is my preference. The same material is used to manufacture plastic cutting boards (available at Sam’s Club in 2020). A square (70 x 70 mm) is cut from the stock piece. Next, a depression is cut into the center of the upper surface using a 1¾” Forstner bit to form a flat bottom, cut 2 mm deep. Bevel the four upper edges of the base surface being sure to stay at least 1 mm from the depression (see picture above). A disk cut from paper coffee filter material is then laid into the depression. “Screens” consisting of two disks, each with a ~1/4” hole removed from the center, is then placed on top of the coffee filter. The lower screen disk is made of a #5 plastic canvas cut to approximately match the diameter of the depression, while the upper disk is made of a #7 or #9 plastic canvas, cut to be slightly larger than the diameter of the vial cap. To make the pill vial water container, drill a 3/16” hole (the weep hole) in the cap of the pill vial (12 or 16 dram). Fill the vial with water and snap on the lid. Invert it, setting the hole in the vial over the hole in the screen. If no bubbles are seen rising in the vial, tap on the vial a few times accelerate the process. The flow eventually starts on its own if the holes are aligned and are the correct size but may take a few minutes to start. A slight "disturbance" will start the flow (tap it). See the in-depth explanation below for details on how this controlled flow of water works. The completed vial-based waterer is shown at the top of this section.
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While the basic waterer is perfect for small crickets or other small critters, a larger water container can be beneficial for occasions such as a vacation or for larger and/or older batches: 1,500 two-week-old crickets (one normal batch) will drain a 16 dram bottle in 24 hours. A solution is to use a 12 ounce soda bottle* in place of the vial (Figure 4). A support stand is needed to support the bottle or else it can/will tip over. My favorite version** uses two pieces of thinner acrylic sheet (3/32”- 1/8”). One is bent to form the base and horizontal back. The second piece, the collar that surrounds the bottle, is cut to a precise length and bent at specific intervals to form three sides of a square that is then glued to the horizontal piece. By precision cutting and bending, the collar holds the bottle without grabbing it. Small reinforcing pieces are glued to the insides of the collar against the horizontal back plate to increase the joint surface area of this thin plastic. The bent style stands are much lighter and appear to be more durable than the 5 piece stands mentioned below. I built a device for bending plastic, which enables me to reproduce the waterers reliably and with greater precision.
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A problem I encountered early on was that the HDPE base easily slid off the acrylic stand. This was solved by using a 3/8” end mill to cut a 3 mm deep pocket in the center of the bottom of the HDPE base (opposite side from the depression) This is to align the base to the stand. The other half of this improvement is to cut off and polish a disk, less than 3 mm long, from a ¼” acrylic dowel rod and glue it to the acrylic stand base so that the HDPE base is centered when a bottle is placed in the holder (see stand above). Problem solved. Be careful not to cut too deep with the end mill, or else the tip from the Forstner bit will make contact with the pocket, potentially draining the water.
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In-depth detail of what controls the water flows or no flow, for those who are curious---
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How this works, you may be wondering? If there is a hole in the cap of an inverted bottle what keeps the water from simply running out, draining the bottle?
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First, a couple of properties of water and HDPE. Water has cohesive forces which simply means like molecules tend to cling together, if possible. Think of the drop of water that forms from a slowly leaking faucet, or from the shower head just after the water is turned off. (Click on the underlined link for more information from a real scientist)
The other property at play is HDPE is very Hydrophobic, it tries to repel water causing the water to bead up and not simply form sheets. An example is water beading on a freshly waxed car.
The two forces working together enable this device to supply a small and constant amount of water while not run into the cricket habitat.
An appropriate sized hole is drilled in the cap to let water escape from the vial. If is too small, cohesive and hydrophobic forces across the hole prevent the water from seeping out. When gravitational pull overcomes the forces allow water to seep out, a slight vacuum forms in the vial and air enters the vial to fill the void created by the water loss to eliminate the vacuum. The first critical part of making the waterer is drilling a hole just large enough to overcome cohesive forces allowing water to seep out and air to enter in a controlled fashion. When the vial is placed on the plastic canvas screen disks in this setup, water can seep out, filling the depression, until sufficient water has dripped out to form an airtight seal around the lid or cap. No air in, no water out. Once enough water has either evaporated or been consumed by crickets, the seal is broken and air enters the bottle, releasing more water and reforming the seal.
With the screens in place, the lower surface of the vial cap may be even with the upper surface of the HDPE base. Due to the beading caused by the two forces, the water level can rise above the upper surface of the base and not flow out, allowing the seal to form with ample water under it.
The plastic canvas screens (also made from HDPE) and vial caps are both hydrophobic If there is no hole in the plastic canvas, or the holes are misaligned, the effective size of the hole is less than what will let water through (increase gravity? :-). The paper coffee filter on the bottom is not hydrophobic, just the opposite as it wicks water out allowing water to cover the entire bottom of the depression, making it available to the crickets along the edges. The paper disk is the only item that is not reusable in this setup. The filter material cost about a penny for 10 disks. The labor to cut them is their major cost.
Pretty slick, eh? ​
A third option -- and this only works on larger crickets. I call this a Tie Fighter design (a nod to Star Wars). Instead of a wide shallow depression, a hole is cut (centered) just a tad wider than the bottle cap and a millimeter or 2 deep, A hole is cut into this that is less than the soda bottle cap diameter being careful to not be too deep else it will join the 3/8' alignment hole on the other side. Two parallel deep troughs are cut between the aforementioned depression and a few millimeters from the edge. Then, a thinner channel is cut to connect each trough to the depression. If cut too wide, crickets WILL crawl up into the water bottle. If cut too thin, cohesive/hydrophobic forces prevent water from filling the channels. The 12 oz. bottle and stand set up is used with the Tie Fighter base. The 3/8” pocket (3 mm deep) in the base bottom is very important to keep the base aligned. If the bottle tips, it will empty out. Everything with this system is reusable.
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*Using a 12 ounce soda/pop bottle is important. The size is well suited to this setup. Soda (pop) bottles are made from heavier plastic than many brands of plain water bottles. Pure Life and grocery store brand water bottles are so flimsy when not capped tend to collapse too easily. Manufacturers do this to cut down on plastic use. 16 ounce beverage bottles are overkill and just too unwieldly. An 8 ounce bottle could work if the stand holds it in place.
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**My original support stands area a simpler option for most people when it comes to manufacturing. It uses 3/16” acrylic sheet, cut into 5 pieces, (bottom, vertical, three pieces that form the band) and glued together using Weldon 40. Ignore the apparent angled front in the picture. This is because of an optical illusion from the camera.
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I uses these exclusively in my cricket farming (12 bins/boxes/cages). Pinheads to 2 week old use the vial and no stand while 2-4+ week old use the 12 oz. bottle with stand. The same base setup is used on both but a finer (#9) top screen is used for younger crickets. I supply these devices to places that use my crickets to feed to their charges. A problem encountered is people inadvertently tip over the vial or bottle when the cage is moved. The soda bottle was easy to remedy. Fill the bottle to less than half full. This is plenty of water and lowers the center of gravity. The vial type was fixed by placing the vial setup in a stand (all bases are the same) and bending a flat bottom U shape piece of acrylic with a hole that captures the top of the vial. The vial cannot tip over, spilling its contents. Have not had a problem since.
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I wish to thank my daughter, Amanda, for her assistance in editing this section. She has an actual engineering degree and understands how to write articles like this. She made sure I dotted my i's and crossed my t's. I made some changes since her edit that she has not seen, so mistakes are all mine.
