This guide is for someone who already has a bearded dragon and wants to know which feeder insects to put in front of it, how big those insects should be, and how the answer changes as the animal grows. It covers staples, occasional feeders, the things that should not go in the enclosure at all, and how to think about buying live insects on a schedule. It is general husbandry, not veterinary advice. Anything that looks like a health problem belongs with an exotics vet.
The diet changes direction as the dragon grows
Pogona vitticeps is an omnivore, but not a consistent one. Hatchlings and juveniles are heavily insectivorous, because they are building tissue quickly and need the protein and the calcium to do it. Adults move toward plants and eat noticeably less animal matter.
Published care sheets do not fully agree on where the line falls. The RSPCA's care sheet puts young dragons at roughly two thirds live food and one third greens, and dragons over about 30 cm at roughly the reverse. VCA's feeding page describes the adult diet as approximately half plant and half animal. LafeberVet puts animal protein at a minimum of a quarter of the adult diet by volume, with leafy greens at half or more.
The numbers differ because the animals do. What every source agrees on is the direction of travel: insects dominate early, greens take over later, and the change is gradual rather than a switch you flip on a birthday. For ordering purposes the useful version is that a growing dragon eats a lot of insects and an adult eats far fewer, so a standing order should shrink over the first eighteen months rather than stay flat.
Which feeders work as a staple
A staple is a feeder you can offer several times a week without the diet going wrong. In practice that means reasonable protein, moderate fat, a body soft enough to digest easily, and no property that accumulates into a problem.
Dubia and other feeder roaches
Feeder roaches are the default staple for most juvenile and adult dragons. They carry more meat than a cricket of the same length, they do not jump, they do not chirp, and they are far easier to keep alive on a shelf than crickets are. Their exoskeleton is softer than a mealworm's, which matters more for younger animals than for adults.
The one caution is that they are a high-protein feeder. Reptile clinicians generally advise against building a diet on a single high-protein insect with no variety, so roaches work best as the base of a rotation rather than the whole of it.
Crickets
Crickets are the other traditional staple, and part of what earns them their place has nothing to do with nutrition. They move, which triggers a feeding response in dragons that have gone off their food, and they come in a genuinely fine size ladder from pinheads for hatchlings up to adults for a full-grown animal.
Against that: crickets are calcium-poor relative to phosphorus, they die quickly if kept badly, they smell, and adult crickets can bite a sleeping lizard. Do not leave uneaten crickets in the enclosure overnight. That rule has a real reason behind it.
We do not sell crickets. Dubia roaches are what we sell instead, and the guide on dubia roaches vs crickets compares the two.
Black soldier fly larvae
Black soldier fly larvae are the exception to a general rule. Almost every commercially raised feeder insect carries far more phosphorus than calcium, which is the reason calcium dusting exists at all. Black soldier fly larvae are the one widely sold feeder consistently reported to run the other way, with more calcium than phosphorus. The trade-off is that they barely move, so a dragon that hunts by movement may ignore them entirely.
Feeders that are treats rather than staples
Nothing on this list is dangerous in normal use. These feeders are here because of what happens when one of them becomes the whole diet.
| Feeder | Why it is not a staple | Reasonable use |
|---|---|---|
| Mealworms | Hard, chitin-heavy exoskeleton and a poor calcium-to-phosphorus ratio. Commonly flagged as a digestion risk for small or young lizards. | Adults, in rotation. Not the main feeder for hatchlings. |
| Superworms | Considerably fattier than a roach or a cricket of the same size. | Occasional. Useful for tempting a picky adult. |
| Waxworms | The fattiest feeder in ordinary circulation, and calcium-poor with it. Dragons will often refuse better food after a run of them. | Rare. Weight gain, on a vet's advice. |
| Hornworms | Very high water content and low protein. They fill a dragon up without feeding it much. | Hydration, and for a dragon that has gone off its food. |
| Silkworms | Not a nutritional problem at all. They are simply short-lived and awkward to keep. | As often as you can practically get them. |
Most of the worm feeders sit in this column, which is worth knowing before building an order around them. They are the easiest live feeders to store and the worst ones to feed exclusively.
Sizing the insect to the dragon
The convention across the hobby is that a feeder should be no wider than the space between the dragon's eyes. It is a conservative rule of thumb rather than a measured threshold, and wild Pogona plainly take larger prey than it allows. It is still the right rule for a keeper, because the failure it guards against is serious and the cost of following it is nothing.
Three notes on applying it:
- Width, not length. A long soft-bodied worm is a different proposition from a broad adult roach. Judge the widest part of the insect.
- Size up one rung at a time. A dragon eating small crickets does not need to jump straight to adults. Size ladders exist so the change can be gradual.
- Match the size to the animal, not to its age. Two dragons hatched the same week can be very different animals six months later.
Feeder sizing is not standardized across the trade, so a medium from one source is not necessarily a medium from another. The dubia roach size chart sets out what each dubia size name means in inches and which size suits a dragon at each age, so you can check a size against your own animal rather than guessing.
What to keep out of the enclosure
- Fireflies. Not a gray area. VCA's guidance states plainly that fireflies are toxic to lizards and should never be fed. Very small quantities have been implicated.
- Wild-caught insects. The risks are pesticide residue and parasites, and there is no way to inspect for either. This includes insects from your own garden.
- Anything left in the enclosure overnight. Uneaten crickets in particular.
- Insects clearly larger than the sizing rule allows, even when the dragon is willing to try.
On the plant side, the usual problems are oxalates and goitrogens rather than toxins. Spinach, chard and beet greens bind minerals. Cabbage, kale and mustard greens are goitrogenic in quantity. None of them are poison, and all of them are a poor choice as the daily green.
Dusting, gut loading, and why the insect alone is not the meal
A feeder insect is a delivery mechanism. What it delivers depends on what it ate and on what you put on the outside of it.
Gut loading means feeding the insects properly in the day or so before they go in. VCA's guidance is to gut load within twelve hours of feeding out. This is the step most keepers skip, and it is the one that changes the nutritional content most.
Dusting means coating the insects in a calcium supplement immediately before feeding. Frequency depends on the animal's age, on whether the supplement contains D3, and on the lighting in the enclosure, so it is a question for your vet rather than a number from a shop. What is not in dispute is that a diet of undusted, unloaded feeders is a calcium-deficient diet for a growing dragon.
For the comparative figures rather than the general rule, the nutrition table in our guide to the best feeder insects for bearded dragons sets moisture, protein, fat and calcium-to-phosphorus ratio out side by side across the common feeders, with sources. The guide on gut loading feeder insects covers what to feed the insects.
How to think about ordering, and where to go next
The common mistake is ordering one feeder in bulk. Live insects cost less per head at volume, so the temptation is to buy a lot of one thing. Two problems follow. The diet narrows to a single species, and you end up storing more animals than you can realistically keep alive.
A more useful shape is one staple in quantity, a second staple in a smaller quantity, and a treat feeder you do not reorder every time. Buy what you can keep in good condition until the next order, not the quantity with the best unit price.
Anything bought live also has to survive the journey and the first hour at your end, which is the part keepers most often get wrong. The guide on what to do when your feeders arrive covers unpacking, and the shipping and live arrival terms set out what happens if something arrives dead.
To build an order, the feeders collection holds the feeders we sell: dubia roaches, black soldier fly larvae, mealworms, superworms, waxworms, hornworms and silkworms among them. For sizing, work from the size chart rather than from the size names.
This guide describes feeding a healthy animal. It does not cover a dragon that has stopped eating, is losing weight, is straining, or is showing any sign of metabolic bone disease. Those are veterinary problems, and an exotics vet is the right person to see.