So youre the proud owner of a bearded dragon. Excellent. And youre struggling to find information about what you can and cannot feed your beloved bearded dragon. Not so excellent. Technology however, is an amazing thing and now at the click of a button, you are spoilt for choices ranging from canned food to live food to feed your pet reptile. A lot of insect stores now provide good quality reptile products which include live
crickets, mealworms, super worms, fruit flies and hissing cockroaches. You can also find out from these shops what the right diet for your bearded dragon is important to bear in mind though that after all they are trying to make money and it is sometimes possible that they misinform you in order to get you to buy reptile products.
Pet reptiles like lizards and salamanders can be fed crickets, mealworms, super worms, hissing cockroaches and fruit flies. The question most often asked by bearded dragon owners is whether or not bearded dragons can be fed mealworms in place of crickets. There is a wide opinion you will receive from most insect stores but in reality, it is best to not feed your bearded dragon mealworms too regularly. This is because mealworms possess hard outer chitins which make it difficult for bearded dragons to digest them. The result is very often impaction which can ultimately result in death of the bearded dragon. So mealworms are best avoided and crickets should be the main food for bearded dragons. If at all you want to feed your pet bearded dragon mealworms, restrict to very few and be careful while doing so. It is also important to remember that mealworms, if given to your bearded dragon too regularly, can also cause them to have very high weight gain.
Your bearded dragons main source of nutrition comes from crickets and various greens. Thats all very well you say, but how does one keep that many crickets at home? The ideal manner in which to store crickets is to use a cricket keeper, which is a cage that has been fitted with a secure lid. This prevents them from being able to escape. You can also keep crickets in a sterilised contained without a lid. However, you need to keep close to thousand crickets together in order to not let them escape. Most of us however, do have family that are terrified of crickets, so it might be an idea to utilise a separate room to store these if you have a pet bearded dragon to feed!
Finally, all pets deserve a treat once in a while and so does your
bearded dragon. You can now buy wax worms that look like maggots and are referred to as maggots in the insect store. They are the equivalent of candy for your bearded dragon and do not provide any nutrition at all. So while it is alright to allow your bearded dragon to indulge on these occasionally, it is certainly not a good idea to make them a regular feature in your pets diet, as they do contain fat.
