Crickets die. That is the reputation, and it is partly deserved, but a good share of what keepers blame on their own husbandry is crickets doing what crickets do. This guide is about holding a batch of crickets from the day they arrive until the day they are fed out: what the bin needs, what the animals need, how long they realistically last, and how to tell an ordinary die-off from one that means you should stop and clean everything. The Bug Cartel does not sell crickets. If you are choosing a feeder rather than holding one you already have, dubia roaches are what we sell instead.
The bin: ventilation and floor space are the whole design
Crickets jump, they climb anything with texture, and they do badly in still, damp air. The container has to answer all three.
Smooth-walled plastic tubs are the standard because crickets get little purchase on them. The lid wants a large mesh panel rather than a few drilled holes. This is not about comfort. A crowded cricket bin generates ammonia from frass, and in a poorly ventilated container that accumulates.
- Egg crate on edge. Crickets need vertical surface to spread out on. Flat cardboard on the floor gives you almost nothing.
- No deep substrate. It traps frass moisture, and frass moisture is the ammonia and mold problem.
- Clear frass regularly. This is the highest-value maintenance job in a cricket bin and the one most often skipped.
- Do not top up an old bin with new stock. The reason is in the disease section below, and it is a good one.
Density matters more than temperature
This is the finding worth knowing, and it is the opposite of how most keepers think about a cricket bin.
A 2023 study in Insects reared house crickets at 25, 30 and 35 °C across three stocking densities. Rearing temperature had only a minor effect on survival, which sat between 80 and 83% across the whole range. Total biomass went up with both higher temperature and higher density, which is what a farm wants. Density is also where the cost showed up: higher rearing density was associated with higher abundance of Acheta domesticus densovirus in the crickets at the end of the run. The paper describes 35 °C as suboptimal for house cricket production.
Read that as a keeper rather than a producer. You are not trying to grow biomass, you already bought the crickets, and every one that dies before it is fed out is a loss. Temperature is not your main lever, so ordinary warm indoor room temperature is fine: no heat mat, no bin next to a radiator, no bin in a sunlit window. Crowding is the lever. Give a batch more floor area and more egg crate than looks necessary, and split a large delivery across two bins rather than packing one.
Humidity: what to aim for, not what number to hit
Published rearing humidity for crickets does not agree with itself. Protocols use figures around 50%, around 60%, and higher again, depending on the study and the life stage. Two things reconcile part of that: very young crickets need more moisture than adults, and high humidity is the condition that helps disease and grain mites move through a bin. Since the literature does not converge on one number, aim at the behavior instead of a hygrometer reading.
- No condensation anywhere in the bin. If the walls fog, ventilation is losing.
- No clustering. Crickets piling onto the water source are telling you the bin is too dry.
- Dry cardboard. Soft, dark or musty egg crate gets replaced, not dried out.
Food and water while they are being held
Water
Use gel or crystals, or a wetted material they cannot submerge in. Not an open dish. Crickets drown readily, and a spilled dish soaks the frass and starts the ammonia and mold cycle. Whatever you use needs replacing before it sours, because crickets foul their water fast.
Food
Cricket diets in the literature are unglamorous: poultry feed, or rodent pellets, or a formulated cricket chow. Any of them does the job of keeping a held batch alive. Keep it dry and available, and take out anything that has gone damp.
Maintenance feeding and gut-loading are different operations. The Merck Veterinary Manual states that gut-loading diets containing at least 12 to 15% calcium should be fed to insects, and that insects should be dusted with a high-calcium supplement immediately before being offered, because crickets are calcium-poor relative to phosphorus on their own. How long the insects should be on the gut-load first is not a settled figure, so treat it as "long enough for the gut to fill, then feed out promptly" rather than a fixed number of hours. Do that to the portion you are about to feed, in a separate tub, rather than to the whole bin. The nutrition table in our bearded dragon feeder guide sets the common feeders side by side, and our gut loading guide covers diets and timing.
How long crickets actually keep
Shorter than people expect, and often for reasons that are nobody's fault.
Laboratory work on house crickets puts mean adult lifespan at roughly 30 to 40 days after the final molt, with a small number of individuals living far longer. Getting there takes about a further seven weeks: published figures for this species give an egg incubation period of around twelve days and total nymphal development of around forty days. If you buy adults, you are buying an animal that is already most of the way through its life.
That reframes a complaint keepers make constantly. "Most of them died in three weeks" is, for adult crickets, frequently senescence rather than evidence that your bin is wrong. If you want a feeder you can hold for a month or more without loss, crickets are the wrong choice, and dubia roaches are the usual alternative. Our dubia roaches vs crickets guide covers why dubia keep for weeks in a holding bin.
Buying smaller crickets buys you time, at the cost of holding them longer before they reach feeding size. If you switch to dubia, the dubia roach size chart matches roach size to your animal.
The disease problem, stated accurately
Cricket keeping has one genuinely serious pathogen story and a lot of garbled versions of it.
Acheta domesticus densovirus is a small DNA virus first reported in a colony collapse in 1977, and it has since caused severe outbreaks in cricket farms across Europe, North America and Asia. It spreads by the fecal-oral route. Published work states plainly that there are currently no confirmed A. domesticus colonies free of it.
Two corrections worth making, because both are repeated constantly:
- It is usually not "cricket paralysis virus." That name belongs to a different, RNA virus. The agent behind the farm collapses is the densovirus.
- Banded crickets are not immune. Gryllodes sigillatus was widely adopted as the resistant alternative. A 2021 study screening reared banded crickets found densovirus in 79 of 80 individuals, including in the apparently healthy population, where infections were present but not producing symptoms.
The practical consequence is simple and it is why the "do not top up an old bin" rule exists. A fecal-oral pathogen in a bin that has had a collapse means the bin is contaminated, and adding new crickets to old cardboard is how you repeat it. It is also the second reason not to crowd: the same 2023 study that found temperature barely moved survival found viral abundance rising with density.
Reading a die-off, and when to stop
| Pattern | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Steady loss over three to four weeks, mostly large adults | Normal senescence. Not a husbandry failure. |
| Fast loss, sharp ammonia smell, wet frass | Ventilation and cleaning. Fixable. |
| Loss concentrated where they cluster, bin fogged | Too damp, or too crowded for the harborage. |
| Rapid collapse across all sizes, sluggish crickets, no obvious husbandry cause | Treat as disease. Stop, do not salvage. |
For the last row, write off the batch, discard the cardboard rather than reuse it, and strip and clean the bin thoroughly before it holds crickets again. Salvaging a handful of survivors into your next order is the specific mistake that turns one bad batch into a recurring problem. If you are worried about a specific animal that ate from a failing bin, that is a question for an exotics vet rather than a care guide.
A batch that arrives dead, dying or visibly wrong is not something husbandry fixes, and it is worth taking up with the seller on the day rather than after a week of trying. Our guide on what to do when your feeders arrive covers the unpacking sequence. For feeders bought from us, our shipping page sets out the live arrival terms, including sending photos or video within 1 hour of delivery if bugs arrive dead.
Where to go next
Nothing in a cricket bin is difficult on its own. It fails because the bin lives somewhere inconvenient and the frass does not get cleared. Setting up a feeder storage station covers making that routine short enough that it actually happens. If crickets keep dying on you and the timeline above says senescence rather than error, the honest fix is a different feeder rather than a better bin, and the rest of the feeder range is where to look.