Bearded Dragons (pogona vitticeps), beardies can be ravenous eaters but they can also be fussy at times! The trick to keeping your pet bearded dragon well fed is to vary the diet, Bearded Dragons are omnivores meaning they will eat vegetable matter as well as live insects so you need to be giving them ideally some fresh vegetables every other day (we will cover that in another guide but for this one we will stick to the livefoods).
As I mentioned earlier beardies can be faddy eaters going through favourites of one type of livefood and then refusing to eat it anymore! To conquer this behaviour in bearded dragons you need to vary the insects that they eat. Bearded dragons will eat virtually all of the livefoods we sell such as Crickets (black and brown), locusts, mealworms, waxworms, roaches, superworms and fruit beetle grubs. The only livefoods we sell that you would never need to feed to a pet bearded dragon would be fruit flies and micro crickets as they are too small. You need to feed appropriately sized insects to match your bearded dragon, so if your bearded dragon is a hatchling you would start off with small sized crickets and move up through the sizes as your bearded dragon grows until it becomes an adult and you are feeding it adult sized insects. The rule of thumb is only feed insects to your pet reptile that are as long as the reptiles mouth is wide to prevent the animal from choking on its prey. Although this is a good rule of thumb in practice its not always possible and reptiles are not overly burdened by chewing away on larger sized prey (just watch an adult bearded dragon munch up an adult locust).
When a bearded dragon is young it will eat crickets, locusts and roaches as a staple diet, for a yummy treat you can add in waxworms. As the Bearded dragon grows and is about 8-10" long they are usually developed enough to be able to manage harder to digest livefoods such as mealworms and super (morio) worms they will also be able to cope with larger treats such as fruit beetle grubs.
As i keep saying variety is the key to keeping your pet bearded dragon interested in its food and keeping it happy and healthy, the best way to achieve this would be with one of our multi buy livefood offers, if you have an adult bearded dragon I would recommend buying our six tub multi buy deal , if you were to choose 2 tubs of adult or extra large locusts, 2 tubs of large crickets, a tub of waxworms and a tub of either superworms or mealworms you should have the ideal hamper to keep your pet bearded dragon well fed for at least a week. When feeding my beardies i always rotate the livefoods that they get so one day they would have locusts, the next crickets and then the next meal or morio worms and then back to the locusts, every day I give them a few waxworms to keep them interested. You can sprinkle a few waxworms onto salad to encourage your beardie to eat his greens! YOu can also add into your bearded dragons diet some dubia roaches and as a really special treat some fruit beetle grubs, but you are best saving the fruit beetle grubs until hes an adult as they are quite big and juicy
