If you do dubia roaches (baaaad climbers) you need 2 adult females to 1 adult male; and you don't even need oats as a substrate. (harder to clean). They are livebearers, and it takes about 6 months to get a stable colony started.
Here's the details:
1. You need to go get you a fairly large rubbermaid container, bigger is going to be best.
2. Next, you are going to need to cut about a 4x4 or 5x5 square out of the top lid and go buy some wire mesh to put over the top so the roaches can't get out, they get air, and spiders can not get in. You can buy little sheets at Wal-Mart or any hardware store.
3. Now for keeping them at the right temperature I stuck them in a room I use for my dragons where I just plugged up the air conditioner vents and voila during the summer it stays nice in there for all my critters. You may not have that luxury though so the best thing to do is take a heating pad or the water pipe heat tape they have at Wal-Mart and put it around the sides or with a pad to one side. Temps need to be somewhere around 90 to 95 degrees.
4. Your also going to need egg flats these are inexpensive but sometimes hard to find. If you have any place around you who sells and raises chickens then they will have them usually, if not then go to aaronpauling.com, thefeederstore.com, or theroachguy.com and they have them just a little more expensive. I usually stack about 5 or 6 in there for them.
You also need two small dishes in there one for food and the other for water. Seems to cheapest at a dollar store or Wal-Mart.
5. The food I make myself and use some stuff most of these guys won't tell you about because they try and sell it to you. You'll need a food processor if you don't already have one, I got mine at Wal-Mart for 10.97, it was the cheapest one but it works. I just mix up dog food, sometimes ferret food, fish flakes, enriched corn meal, or even cereal any or all of the combinations work very well. If you want to make it even more nutritious the big time roach breeders put bee pollen in. I find all this is pretty easy to attain you can make the food for them as simple or complex as you want.
6. They are also going to need water. The easiest thing I have found is go to aaronpauling.com, he has water crystals for .99 cents a ounce which makes 1 gallon of water crystals! I buy about 10 ounces at a time and pay around 11.00 dollars total for the crystals and shipping (because the crystals are cheaper the more you buy) this lasts me about a month and I have two colonies. Every now and then I throw in some fresh fruit or veggies, such as carrots, potatoes, and oranges seem to be the best at holding water and getting ate up pretty fast. If I run low on crystals and don't get the new ones in quick enough I usually put fresh fruit/vegetables in every other day or run to Wal-Mart and just buy some gelatin, the non-flavor kind, and just use water it seems to work.
7. You will also need to make sure the humidity stays above at least 40 percent in there but that normally is taken care of unless you live somewhere that is really, really dry. Also the temperature you don't have to worry about too much, they are really easy to take care of and are very hardy.
8. You need to decide who to buy from the cheapest way I have found to buy them are too watch the for sale and for free sections of beardeddragon.org. Watch for people who just want to get rid of their colonies or need to sell some off, they are usually the cheapest. If not I went through this guy
bigcox@brmemc.net and he treated me amazingly. I got i think 500 roaches and 10 adult pairs for 89 dollars shipped. It is very hard to beat that deal on roaches. With that I didn't have to wait for colonies to get bigger before I started feeding. You may have to wait a month or two before you start feeding off your roaches just so they can get larger and begin having babies or nymphs.
9. The sexually mature roaches are easy to tell apart from the others. The males have wings and the females have little stubs for wings. The males can't fly so don't worry. Try and make sure you don't have more males than females and if you notice a large number of males feed them to your dragons to lower their numbers. If you buy a baby dragon or only want to feed a certain size of roach to your dragon then the easy thing I have found is take a cool whip container cut a square in the top and place that wire mesh based on the size of roach you want, such as 1/2 inch mesh for 1/2 inch roaches and put a piece of fruit inside the container and place it in your colony. After an hour or so you will have a bunch of little roaches in there eating the fruit.
I know it seems like a lot but I just tried to cover every step that you might need to know. All in all they are very, very easy to take care of.
also, vaseline smeared around the top edge (1-2 inches) will work if you don't want a cover over the top, but a cover is better if for no other reason than to keep other things out.
lol.. duh disclaimer: not everyone keeps them this way, that's just how *I* do it.
