Most of us keeping dubia roaches are doing so as a free source of food for our pets. Dubia roaches are capable of producing hundreds of babies when kept correctly, leading to a never-ending supply of food. This leads to the obvious question: when do dubia roaches breed?
Roach Age
It goes without saying that as a starting point you’ll need adult (sexually mature) cockroaches of both sexes.
Depending on the size of the roaches that you buy it may be necessary to wait patiently for some months until they reach this size. Once they have reached maturity, however, they should start producing young pretty quickly if their other requirements are met.
Time of Year
Dubia roaches will breed at any time of year, so long as the other requirements below are met. This means that your dubia roach colony has the potential to keep growing and prospering right throughout the year, rather than there being a specific “breeding season”.
The one factor to consider is that dubia roaches tend to prefer warmer conditions, so you may find more babies produced over the summer months. Kept suitably warm, however, production should still continue throughout the winter months.
Temperature
Dubia roaches like warm conditions. Minimum temperatures for your roaches should be 68‘F/20’C. Many keepers provide temperatures up to 90‘F/32’C, though my colonies seem to thrive around the midpoint of 77‘F/25’C.
Typically, dubia roaches kept too cool will fail to breed. If you are maintaining a group of adult roaches but not seeing any young being produced one of the best solutions is to raise the temperature. Within a short while of hitting these recommended temperatures you should see tiny roaches running around the colony.
Light Intensity
Dubia roaches don’t like bright sunlight. Quite the opposite in fact – they favour darkness wherever possible.
Keeping your roach colony brightly lit can hold back the chances of breeding occurring. Indeed, many professional breeders use solid plastic containers for their roaches that block out almost all light.
Worst case, consider draping an old tablecloth etc. over your dubia roach colony to reduce the light getting in and trigger breeding activity.
Gender Ratios
Adult male dubia roaches can fight with one another. Fighting can not only stress the females out, but may mean that your males are too focused on fighting each other rather than on their breeding duties.
A ratio of one male to four or five females is generally recommended as the optimal ratio.
Remove excess males and feed them to your pets to achieve this goal.
Safety & Security
One final factor to consider is whether your roaches have plenty of places to hide away from one another.
Adults can fight, and they may also eat some of the young roaches that are produced.
Giving them lots of hiding places within the colony can therefore help with their breeding success. Consider adding plenty of egg flats, crumpled up newspaper or cardboard toilet tubes so the roaches have somewhere to feel safe and secure.
Conclusion
Breeding dubia roaches really isn’t difficult, and can be achieved at any time of year if the conditions are right. By ticking off all the basics outlined above you’ll just have to be patient while the adults breed, eggs are incubated, and the young are born.
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