No really, I've always loved bugs since I was a kid and I use to keep meal worms and crickets. My grandpa , rest his soul, would take me to the bait shop and buy them for me and I'd put them in aquariums with plenty of soil and a potato slice.
Recently I was doing research on the nutritional value of insects, which I've known about for awhile but I wanted further info. I can easily order crickets online, they reproduce very fast and I think it would just be so easy to keep em as snack food. There are so many yummy sounding recipes for crickets and they are quite easy to prepare and it seems like a switch to a "buggy" diet would be both economical and very interesting. I'm trying to convenience my family to join me but for now this is going to be a one-man experiment.
Crickets taste like sunflower and honestly I would LOVE to raise some giant water beetles, they are awesome bugs and they sound delicious. That would require a bigger commitment because I'd probably need a freshwater aquarium and other stuff.
I'll start small with crickets though and report back here with progress. Don't know when I'll order them. Interested if anyone else has tried raising amounts of bugs for food and yes I am being 100% serious.
I have NEVER heard about this or ever considered it. I don't think I could do it to be honest! I clicked on this thread because I'm considering doing the same but not for ME to snack on! I want to raise them for my beardie.
Actually I have learnt of an initiative where I come from involving the mass rearing of crickets to be used as food. They are quite nutritious and easy to rear. There is even an initiative to make cricket sausages with cricket flour being the main ingredient. The equipment required to rear them is very cheap and basically involves a bucket, a light source and a net. Quite a novel initiative though I doubt whether they would be pets in your case!
Recently I accidentally chewed on a tiny beetle that apparently had perched unseen on the rim of my water glass. I tasted nothing but was alarmed, upon removal of the chewed item, to discover that it was indeed, a bug. I was disgusted, grossed out, and wanted to brush my teeth and wash my mouth out with soap. I didn't do that but that's just how disturbed I was by the idea that I had just removed an insect from my mouth. I can't for the life of me, imagine eating a bug on purpose. It would take an awful lot of starvation to get me to do so, and said bug would have to be charred to a crisp, I think. Even then, it would greatly disturb me to put such a thing in my mouth. I think, if I were THAT hungry, I would sooner catch, kill, clean and cook a mouse, reptile, or other small animal and leave the bugs alone. There. Rant over. Now, as for cricket farming... I had a skink once upon a time who loved crickets, so I started my own little farm. I put dirt in an aquarium, with rocks and stuff in the bottom, bought a bunch of crickets at a bait shop, (BAIT... that's what crickets are, NOT people food) and fed them gradually to my lizard. Eventually I would overturn a rock now and again and discover the cutest little baby crickets. I thought they were absolutely adorable but I knew then that I was on the right track and from that time on, I never again had to purchase crickets for my skink.
We were in Bangkok last March and my husband challenged my sister's kids to sample the cooked insects being sold by the street vendor. The 3 kids (they are actually 20 to 25 years old) took the challenge and we bought a mix of fried cricket, tiny snails, caterpillar and small scorpions. We even took a video to capture how their faces looked like when they were chewing the insects. But after the excitement, the 3 kids admitted that the insects actually tasted good.
The vendor of the cooked insects said that he cooks the insects himself and gets his supply from a farm. But the information stops there. By the way, we were in Bangkok in 2012 and we had already spotted that same insect vendor. So that means his business is still surviving until now.
But the caveat in your planned business is the market. It is no use raising something for business when there will be no demand. Just my thoughts.
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I'm thinking of starting a cricket farm
