Phil's Phamous Insect Imobilizer.

[PhilinYuma]

For those members who found the narrow tolerances demanded by my "lazy man's aspirator" too challenging, here is another device that will greatly reduce your feeding time, calm your nerves, and endear you to your Significant Other.

Do you have problems taking squirming crickets out of their container to feed to your hungry mantids? Do they sometimes wriggle from your grasp? Do some jump on yr hand while you are capturing another one and then bail out, never to be seen again until they ambush yr S.O.? Wouldn't it be great if you could induce yr crix to wait quietly and patiently to be picked up one by one? You can!

Here is the equipment you will need. A bowl or small plastic bucket that will fit comfortably on yr work area, half filled with tap water. That's it.

Open the cric container and shake the various bits of cardboard and bok choy leaves over the bowl of water. The crix will fall in and wait patiently to be picked up and fed to your mantids. Is that cool or not?

It also works for stunned flies. How many times have you found half way through feeding a bunch of flies, that they have started defrosting and flying off? If you dump the stunned flies in the bowl of water, this will never happen again, and you will have the added satisfaction of knowing that your flies are clean.

And that's it folks. If you think that this might work for you, give it a try and let us know how it works out for you.

(I'm not joshing you, folks. I am really doing this and find that it works like a charm! )

 

[d17oug18]

i find this to be exelentae advice(good advice lol) i will definantly try this at home. Say phil? will the flies start flying as they come to or are they stuck in the water until you grab them? just double checking cause i see the answer in your informative paragraphs =) i need to start thinking up something of my own lol

 

[jameslongo]

Haha I'll have to try it tonight Sounds like a cool feeding alternative. By the way, you should write infomercials, Phil :lol: Quirky & informative!

 

[Peter Clausen]

This is great! If I hadn't just received 1200 new feeder roaches in the mail today (B. dubia are so slow anyway), I'd be waking up Roxanne to tell her how much easier her life is going to be now. (my wife feeds our reptiles.)

I'll have to try this with the flies. I'm thinkin' I'm likin' it, a lot! Don't they always seem to be defrosting to that point of flight about 30 seconds before you could be finishing with the last hungry mantis? It never fails that I have to put the whole lot of flies back in the freezer to feed those last three mantises (and we all know that we forgot about the flies like 15% of the time whether we have a timer set or not! Poor, wasted flycicles!).

 

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[SIZE=14pt]Hey Phil that is a cool way [/SIZE]

 

[massaman]

I have a simpler way for crickets at least is put them in a deep tupperware container that they cant jump out of and all you need is a test tube and try gather as many crickets in one spot as you can and tilt the container and have the crickets fall right into the test tube and no mess and no fuss and it works for me!

 

[hibiscusmile]

i like the water bath Phil, so they dont drown? I noticed where I have my superworms pupaeing that the containers I have them in sit in a tray of water, dont want no mites mixing anywhere, so I use trays of water a lot, the one I cleaned today had a lot of dead bbs and hundreds, ok well dozens of fruit flies floating in there, I used to use the icewater to set the flies in when they came out of the fridge to keep them cold longer, but now I just pupae them in the fruit fly bottles and stick the bottles in the feeder holes, but I digress...haha, old timers memory fails her.... oh yea, the water bath, hummm maybe I will go take a bath.