Most avoidable losses on a live-insect order happen after the box is in the house, not before. The insects have spent the journey in a container designed to keep them alive and not much else, and the first twenty minutes decide whether they recover or keep declining. This guide is a general unpacking routine for feeder insects. It is not specific to any one supplier's packing, and the terms for an order that arrives in poor condition are in the live arrival guarantee on our shipping page.
Before you open anything, spend two minutes looking
Open the box as soon as it arrives, but look at the outside first. What you can see before you disturb it is information you cannot recover afterwards.
- Where it was. In the sun, in the shade, in a mailbox, behind a storm door. All of those are different environments.
- How long it sat. Compare the delivery scan to when you picked it up.
- How it feels. Put a hand flat on the box. Noticeably hot or cold through the carton tells you the thermal element ran out, or worked too hard, or the parcel ran long.
- Damage. Crushing, a corner tear, a wet patch, a torn label. Crushing in particular is a cause of loss that has nothing to do with temperature.
If any of that looks wrong, photograph the box before you cut the tape. Our guide on what to do when insects arrive dead covers what is worth recording and in what order.
The first ten minutes
Work somewhere the temperature is ordinary and stable, and somewhere an escapee is recoverable. A kitchen counter next to an open door is the wrong place. A bathtub or a large storage tub is a good place.
- Open the outer box and take out the thermal element first. A spent heat pack is still warm and a melted gel pack is wet, and neither should stay pressed against the container.
- Do not shake, tip or upend the primary container. Insects that piled during transit are already stressed, and the ones at the bottom are the ones most at risk.
- Open or loosen the primary container so it gets air, and leave it somewhere quiet at room temperature for a few minutes before moving anything.
- Look before you sort. Count roughly, look for movement, and notice whether the container is damp inside.
- Move them into their permanent housing. Do not tip and hope; transfer in a controlled way so nothing is crushed in the lid.
- Offer moisture, but not standing water. For most feeders that means a water crystal gel or a piece of vegetable rather than a dish.
- Leave them alone for several hours before feeding any of them out.
Temperature shock is the common mistake
The instinct with a cold box is to warm it up quickly, and with a hot box to cool it down quickly. Both are worse than doing nothing.
A container that has been cold for a day should come up to room temperature on its own. Putting it on a heat mat, next to a radiator or under a lamp warms the outside of the container much faster than the inside, and the insects on the near side get the worst of it. The reverse is also true: a box that arrived hot does not belong in a refrigerator. Gradual is the whole point, and an ordinary room does gradual well.
The exception is the group that is meant to be kept cool anyway. Mealworms and waxworms are commonly stored at cool temperatures once they are settled, but that is a storage decision made after they have recovered, not a first response to a hot box.
Motionless is not the same as dead
This is worth understanding before you throw anything away. Insects cooled below their critical thermal minimum enter chill coma. They stop moving, do not respond to being touched, and look exactly like dead insects. Warmed back up, many of them recover. Recovery from chill coma takes time, though. It does not happen the moment the temperature rises.
So a winter box that looks like a total loss on the counter may not be one an hour later, or three hours later. Photograph or film the container first. If bugs look dead, a claim needs those photos or video emailed within 1 hour of delivery or pickup, so send them within the hour even if you expect some to recover. Then give the container room-temperature time before you judge what is really lost. The live arrival guarantee on our shipping page sets out the full terms.
Rehousing, by feeder
The transfer target should be set up before the box arrives, not built around it while insects are escaping.
Crickets
Crickets need three things immediately: ventilation, vertical surface area and dryness. Egg flats or cardboard tubes stop them piling, which is the main cause of losses in the first day. Keep the humidity low, keep waste off the floor of the container, and remove dead insects promptly, because a damp container with dead crickets in it produces ammonia and ammonia takes the rest of them.
Roaches
Dubia roaches are the easiest arrivals to deal with. A smooth-sided bin with a ventilated lid, stacked egg crate for surface area, warmth and moderate humidity covers it. They generally come out of transit in better shape than crickets and settle faster. Our dubia roach care guide covers the bin, food and water in more detail.
Worms and grubs
Mealworms and superworms usually arrive in bedding and can stay in it while they settle. Sift out anything that has died and any obviously spoiled bedding. Mealworms are commonly held cool once settled, which slows them down and extends how long a batch lasts. Superworms are not treated the same way and are kept at room temperature. Waxworms are their own case again, and are kept cool and dry rather than cold.
Isopods, springtails and cultures
Isopods and clean-up crew arrive in damp substrate, and their risk on arrival is drying out rather than overheating. Get them into a container with a moisture gradient and some leaf litter or bark, and check the substrate has not dried during transit. We do not sell isopods, springtails or substrates, so this is for keepers who buy them elsewhere.
Wait before you feed them out
A feeder that has just come out of a shipping container is usually dehydrated and has an empty gut. The general practice is to let new arrivals settle, take water and eat for a period before they are used, which is also when any gut loading is done. Our bearded dragon feeder guide has a nutrition table comparing eight feeders.
How long to wait depends on what you keep and how hard the journey looks to have been. Keepers of bearded dragons, leopard geckos and crested geckos generally have the flexibility to delay a feeding by a day. If you do not, that is an argument for keeping a small buffer of settled feeders on hand rather than feeding straight from the box.
The first week
Losses in the days after a delivery are usually a housing problem rather than a shipping problem, and the two most common causes are the same every time: too little ventilation and too much moisture. Check the container daily for the first few days, take out anything dead, and do not let the population sit on damp waste.
If the shipment looked poor from the moment it was opened, that is a different situation, and the sequence for it is in dead on arrival. Our shipping page sets out the live arrival guarantee and the shipping terms, and our guide on how live insects are shipped explains what was in the box and why. The full feeder range is a reasonable place to start if this delivery has made you reconsider which feeder suits your setup.