Start with feeders nobody notices
Discretion is mostly decided at the species choice. Crickets make poor houseguests in the feeder world: adult males chirp, the colony smells sweet and stale within days, and escapees turn up in skirting boards. Dubia roaches, by contrast, are silent, cannot climb smooth plastic, barely smell when kept dry, and stay where they are put; black soldier fly larvae are equally quiet and live in a small sealed tub, and mealworms in a lidded box in the fridge door raise no comment at all. Build your colonies around the quiet species and much of the guest problem disappears before storage is even considered.
Housing that reads as ordinary storage
Keep colonies in smooth-sided, opaque tubs with fine mesh set into the lid — from the outside they look like any other household storage box. Stack them where storage naturally lives: the laundry or utility room, a kitchen cupboard away from food preparation surfaces, the under-stair cupboard, or a wardrobe in the reptile room. Egg-cardboard flats inside give roaches their hiding surface without anything visible from the room. Keep the label, if you use one, plain and turned to the wall, and keep the tubs off open shelving in living areas — out of the sightline is the whole arrangement; no guest opens a closed cupboard looking for insects.
Keeping smell and escapes at zero
A dry colony is a discreet colony. Feeder odour usually comes from damp frass and dead insects left too long, so work on a fixed rhythm: remove dead insects and old food at each feed, keep fresh vegetables in a shallow dish rather than scattered on the floor of the tub, and let ventilation do its work instead of sealing tubs airtight. A thin barrier of petroleum jelly inside the rim stops climbing species, and a quick count of the floor around the storage spot during cleaning tells you honestly whether anything is getting out. Warmth speeds breeding, so a colony kept in a cooler cupboard grows steadily without the smell that comes with a hot one.
The guest-day pattern
On days people are coming over, colonies need no special operation beyond timing: feed the reptiles earlier in the day, do any colony sorting or cleaning the day before rather than during the visit, and keep gut-loading vegetables in a lidded box in the fridge instead of a bowl by the tubs. Never carry an open colony tub through a room full of guests, and never open one in a social space — a single escapee cricket in the hallway undoes months of quiet success. Handled this way, the colonies are simply part of the house's backstage, like cleaning supplies. When mould appears or a colony suddenly crashes, put a follow-up question to KinsLe's Kinny; he answers using the KinsLe Answers library.