Juvenile Bearded Dragons should eat twice daily. At that age their diet should consist mainly of insects. Remember, the insects cannot be bigger than the space between your dragon’s eyes. In addition to the live food you should offer your lizard dark-green leafy vegetables, flowers or fruits. There is no age or quantity restriction to it, the sooner you will introduce greens to your beardie, the better.
It is very important to teach your baby bearded dragon to eat vegetables. So even if you see your juvenile is not keen on the greens, still provide them daily and always fresh. To encourage them to eat vegetables, you can put some worms in the “dragon salad”. This way they will eat some of it while biting on the worms.
Before feeding, shred the leaves, spray them with water and sprinkle with calcium/vitamin supplements. We recommend to use supplements but always follow the instruction on the packaging.
Don’t forget to also provide daily fresh water in a steady shallow dish, as your Bearded Dragon may try to sit in it or run through.
With the age you will reduce the frequency of the feedings.
Average adult Bearded Dragon should eat live food two to three times a week. It is important at any age not to over-feed your pet and stick to the space between eyes rule. Overfeeding or feeding your dragon too large insects may result in serious internal issues often causing death.
So you are possibly asking yourself how many bugs to give? The amount depends mainly on your reptile appetite, the age and size of the live food.
- One way to follow is the very popular “15 minutes rule” where you feed him/her for 15 minutes and all what is left over after this time you remove from the enclosure.
- Other way is to feed for less than 10 minutes and observe when your beardie is full. This is recommended for juvenile as well as for adults.
Our Ragna has a healthy appetite and is very fast eater. He can easily eat more than 10 small-medium crickets within 5minutes, I don’t even want to know how many he could eat within 15minutes. I assume at some stage he would stop but we don’t want to take such risk. We mainly observe his reactions and few minutes after he looses the interest we remove the insects. This is important, as after an hour the crickets are empty gutted and not only have less nutrition value but also can be dangerous. Hungry crickets may even bite your beardie in the night or feed on his/hers excrements.
At the end of the day all leftovers of food and water you should throw away and clean the dish, to replace it next morning with fresh salad and refreshment.
