1. The complete life cycle of the House Cricket is approximately 8 to 10 weeks. 
2. Crickets begin life as eggs, hatch into nymphs, which mature into adults. 
3. When the nymphs grow too large for their exoskeletons that are made of chitin, they moult a series of 5 times. 
4. After the final moult, the wings are released and the male can then "chirp". 
5. Crickets chirp by rubbing their two upper wings together, but only the male has the special rough vein on its wing that makes the sound louder when the other wing is rubbed against it.
6. Male crickets grow to approximately 1 inch long and females sometimes are even larger.

Temperature Range:

Your first secret to success is a fairly high temperature without things going mouldy.

Smaller crickets require warmer temperatures. Pinheads do best at 88-92°F., with 1/2 to 3/4 inch doing best at 80-92°F. and adults at 75-85°F.

Cricket nymphs (smaller than pinheads) held at 80°F. require up to 60-65 days to mature, while those kept at 90°F. require only 30-35 days to complete their development.

METHOD 1:

What you'll need:
3 large 30 Litre Tupperware® that have decent quality lids
plastic Chinese food containers
aluminium window screen
clear packaging tape or fluon
heat mat or spotlight
paper egg crates
vermiculite
cricket food – see Cricket Diet
adult crickets

What you'll do:
In the 3 large "Tupperware" you set up a stack of around 15 egg cartons upside down and in the lid cut a couple of ventilation holes with a hole saw or sharp blade and silicon aluminium fly screen over the openings. You must use aluminium. Don’t use fibreglass or nylon, as the crickets will chew through it.
Next to this you place your waterer. The water should be checked regularly and rinsed out every two or three days.
The coffee jar lids are used as feeding dishes. Two are used for each cage and checked and cleaned regularly. Dry food in one and vegetable scraps in the other.
Next to this are the "laying boxes" which are the Chinese food containers tightly packed with your damp vermiculite. These boxes are rotated weekly and will require checking to make sure they remain damp. If the egg flats dry out all the eggs will die. More than 1 can be used at a time if a large number of crickets are in the breeding colony. The laying boxes are 5 or 6 lunch box sized containers with aluminium screen fitted onto the lid. These should be broad and as low as possible to allow easy access for the crickets or eggs may be lost in other parts of the breeding enclosure. See Diagram below
This is all stacked up on a heat mat or next to a heating light. The temperature should be a fairly constant 26°C to 28°C . You will soon be able to tell if it is too cool because the crickets will be very quite and not eating or moving about.
Now you are ready to add the crickets. One punnet of about 25 adults 
In your first large "Tupperware" will be the breeding colony. This is where you add the crickets you purchased as your starters. If warm enough they should be calling and laying eggs in the first "laying box" provided within a couple of hours in their new home. This laying box will contain thousands of eggs within a week and can be seen as tiny grains of rice in the top layer of the medium.
After 1 week this container is replaced with a fresh one and the process starts over again. The removed container is given a pinch of fish flakes to feed the babies when they hatch and is sealed shut to maintain humidity and placed in a warm area on the containers. 
7 to 10 days later this "Tupperware" should be teeming with hatchling crickets or "pin heads" and the next egg flat is ready to come out and take its place. The pinheads are ready to transfer to the second large "Tupperware" which will be one of your two rearing boxes. This rearing cage is exactly the same as the breeding cage minus the egg flats. The medium used for the eggs should be allowed to dry out at this time forcing the pinheads to move out into the rearing cage and can then be removed and cleaned to use again. This will give you a cage full of all similar sized crickets that you can start using at any time. These pinheads should be adult size in about 4 to 5 weeks and some placed into the breeding container to replace the older crickets in there to build the breeding colony up to around 200 or 300 crickets.
When the second egg flat is hatched it is moved into the second rearing container and you have a second colony of feeders that are smaller than the first but of uniform size to each other and the same thing happens. When they reach near adult size some are returned to the breeding colony and the rest are fed off.

The important thing is to continually replace your breeding colony because as they get older they produce less and less eggs.

METHOD 2:

What you'll need:
Large plastic bins (similar to plastic swing top bins, pick one that has a greater height)
1/2-pint plastic soup containers and lids
aluminium window screen
clear packaging tape or fluon
rearing container for baby crickets (plastic shoeboxes)
paper egg crates/toilet rolls
vermiculite
cricket food – see Cricket Diet
adult crickets

What you'll do:
About 3 inches from the rim of the big plastic bin place long strip of clear packaging tape along (or paint fluon, ensuring that it has dried before introducing crickets) the inside perimeter. Crickets cannot crawl past this zone because the tape doesn't provide them with enough traction, so they end up falling to the bottom of the bin.
Using a utility knife cut a big diameter on the soup lids, keeping enough of the rim to still make if a functional lid.
Using a pair of scissors, cut the aluminium screen to fit the inside diameter of the plastic soup container.
In the plastic soup container, add enough slightly dampened vermiculite to the brim, add your aluminium screen and close with the lid. This will be the egg deposition containers. See Diagram below.

In the large plastic bin, add your paper egg crates and on top of one of the soup lids, add your vegetable scraps (the scraps will be the food for the crickets), and finally the egg deposition containers.

The crickets will learn to use the egg deposition chambers soon enough. Take it out of the cricket-rearing container in a couple of days.

Place the egg deposition container in a plastic shoebox with lid. You may also want to add tape near the brim of the sweater box to prevent the crickets from crawling to far up. Add the toilet paper core.

The shoebox must be placed in a warm environment around 85°F. The eggs will hatch in 10-12 days. Use the toilet paper core to tap the crickets into the frog's tank. Crickets love to congregate in dark areas, so the core come in handy for transferring crickets.

For daily maintenance, make sure to get rid of dead crickets because they can spread infection. Add food periodically and make sure that they have a source of moisture. Vegetable scraps provide them with enough moisture.

CRICKET EGG LAYING CONTAINERS:

To Feed:

By placing this culture in the small lizards cage and covering the lizards cage vents with a very fine gauze or panty hose you have a food factory producing in there every day, all day for about 1 week 8:)). The culture should be placed away from any basking lamps and heater pads or hot rocks so you don't cook them.

If you require pinheads to feed your lizards then the easiest way is to place a recently hatched egg flat in the enclosure.

Housekeeping:

Do not overcrowd them, as overcrowding is the major cause of excessive death in crickets. They will be fine if they aren’t required to be "stacked up" in their new home. Each cricket needs to be able to sit directly on some surface rather than on another cricket.

Clean out the rearing containers are cleaned out at the end of their cycle before the next load of pinheads is introduced. It is important to clean the enclosure(s) thoroughly once a month at least: remove all sheds and carcasses; put in fresh cardboard rolls/egg carton, throwaway left over food and fruit. Wash with hot soapy water, removing all bits of cricket faeces. Let air-dry. By cleaning regularly, the distinctive “cricket” odour will be reduced.

If you find you are getting too many crickets of the size you need many lizards will learn to accept defrosted insects and any excess can simply be frozen for use at a later date. Just place the crickets into the freezer and they will slowly cool down, their metabolism will lower until they are asleep and they will then die from the cold. This is a very humane way of doing this. The colony can also be cooled down a few degrees and the whole process slowed that way.

Cricket Diet:

The following recipe for dry food is inexpensive and will last quit some time, depending on the number of crickets you are feeding. This food is used for all sizes of crickets. 

8 parts ground up dried cat pellets
2 parts ground up monkey chow
10 parts skim milk powder (by volume)
1 part of a good quality calcium supplement intended for reptiles or amphibians.
More supplements can be sprinkled onto the food as the crickets eat it. This is stored in an airtight container in a cool spot. An occasional sprinkle of fish flakes when replenishing their dry food also gives a bit of variety.
"Pin heads" or newly hatched crickets can be fed on good quality Fish flakes alone for about the first two weeks.
If desired, crickets can be "gut-loaded" with a higher protein food several days prior to their being fed to your herps.

Do not forget to supply water for the crickets! Place pieces of sponge in a shallow dish and moisten it. Make sure there is no standing water in your waterer, as small crickets can easily drown in even the smallest amount of standing water. Be sure to wash the waterer and wash or replace the sponges at least once a week (twice is better). Unwashed waterers are one of the leading causes of offensive odours in your cricket enclosure.