I recycle my silica gels by frying them over a used frying pan (given to me by my dear wife). This allows me to re-use the gels many times over.

I usually start off with a very small, slow fire, as can be seen here. Once I get the pan heated up (with the silica gel already in the pan), I will monitor and stir the content in a slow circular manner. Of course, you could stir in any manner that you want - so long as you keep that hand of yours moving.

This picture shows the original state of the silica gels. Actually, there are all brands and type of silica gels here, from all sources. That is why you can see that the content is sort of multi-coloured. The wooden spatula was a gift as well. I found that cutting off the mid portion of the base allows for easier gel movement.

Here is the same lot of gels, just about 25 minutes later. One interesting fact that I found out is that the longer you keep the gels in the hot pan (try not to melt them), the better the absorbent power the gels provide.

From what I know, silica gels (a synthetic form of sodium silicate) by themselves are harmless. The blue indicator chemical, supposedly Cobalt (II) chloride, may not be so harmless. In fact, it is deemed as carcinogenic. Now, that puts me a bit on the worrying side.

I did some searches on the internet and everyone else is promoting the re-cycling aspect with the cautionary side note on beware-of-small-beads-choking thing. Poison seems to be a non-topic. Nevertheless, there are some mentioning of poisonous stuff at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silica_gel].

For the moment, to ensure that I do not breathe in fine silica dust - due to all the stirring and heating, I have started putting on surgical mask when doing the slow frying of the gels. Will this help? I hope it does.

Here is a macro view of a wet silica gel!

Cricket Nymphs Having Fun

I breed small cricket nymphs for my fish. This adds to the variety of diets for the small fishes that I keep, in addition to their fish flakes and frozen worms. Some of the nymphs will eventually grow into full grown crickets - where I will use them to lay more eggs for the net batch of nymphs.

Here are some pictures of the nymphs. Their body length is between 2.5mm to 3mm long.

This one is a model nymph. It stays here for as long as I am willing to take shots of it. As they move around frequently, and quickly, opportunity like this is hard to come by.

The one on the left looks like a hippo. Yes, they are cute fellows. When you look at the thickness of the leaf, you will get to understand how small these nymphs are. These are less than a day old. For the record, I juxtaposed two photos together just to get this "circus" feel.

This is another one, exploring the small area where I keep them. This special area is my PhotoBox where I put little insects, eggs and nymphs together for photo shoot. When they first emerged from the egg, they were between whitish and milky. Over time, they will become darker, as seen here.

This one ran into a corner that was full of ultra-fine sand. These sand had been pounded for some purposes. Unfortunately, I did not know that they were so fine until I saw the nymphs being covered totally with them. Eventually, I had to clear the sand for they were simply too fine to be of any benefit to all the micro-insects around.

This spider came by when I was taking some pictures and I let it have one of the nymphs for food. This shot is another juxtaposed situation where I merged two separated shots together. 

 A totally "black" nymph. This is a senior and is about 2 days old.

From each batch of eggs, I would probably get between 900 to 1200 nymphs.