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how to breed and raise Fruit-Flys

  • Thread starter aea3
  • Start date
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how do you raise Fruit-Flys,and breed them?
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I wouldn't attempt this unless you want larvae in your mouth everytime you take a bite out of a fruit...
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oh i'm serious all right
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Well, good luck. My VFT soil seems to produce enough fungus gnats to feed my Drosera, Nep, and some baby VFT traps. Fruit flies are a major problem in California, I'm not even sure that they're legal here...
 
I'm from the Bay Area, CA.

Thankfully I have never witnessed any fruit fly larvae in my produce my whole life.
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But I get a lot of fungus gnats in plants potted in miracle grow mix. (I think it contains peat too)
 
Fruitflies are easy to breed, all you have to do is transffer a few flies to a fresh media container every week or two. It's keeping them in good supply with many mouths that gets hard to do.

If you go to a Petco or better, a specialty reptile shop you can buy a starter culture or two of flightless fruit flies (look for a culture that has a few flies and lots of maggots-the maggots (are a good sign the culture is not old) look closely for mould, fungus or lots of dead flies/black spots or dry looking media in the bottom of the culture-avoid these! Any fungus or diseases from one culture can affect your other cultures. If your containers develop these symptoms toss them out immediately, do not use the flies in it or the container.

You'll do good to pick up a few disposable quart size deli containers and some plastic screen from the hardware store for the next steps...

Look up "fruit fly media recipes" at google.com and follow one of the hundreds out there. Or you can buy premade media which will look like white or blue hungry jack dried potato flakes all you do is add water.

When you have your media and containers poke holes in the container lids with a needle or cut a large hole in the lid and cover it with a piece of cheese cloth and tape it down.
Then put the media in and stick a 4" wide x 8" long strip of screen (this gives the newly hatched flies someplace dry to hang out while they await their impending demise. The media below will become full of eggs and maggots - not a pretty sight! I keep my cultures under a fishtank stand so I don't have to look at them til I go to feed the fish (and CPs). My Nepethes get fruitflies and they seem to grow well when "eating" on a regular basis.

I should mention, don't allow the fruit flies from the reptile shop to breed with fruitflies from your area, what will happen is the next generation of fruitflies will be able to fly-whch will cause problems in your house-whereas the hopping genetically altered fruit flies are easy to swat should a few bounce away while feeding.

When shopping for fruit flies note that there are usually two types available. Drosophilia heydei and D. melanogaster, the red eyed variety is larger and take longer to get their cultures going. The smaller type are faster breeders and can be fed to smaller plants too.

If you are only feeding your Nepenthes with them you might consider just buying a bag of a dozen 2 week old crickets at petco/petsmart once a month and feed them those instead of all the work of raising flies.

Good luck!
 
Why would you want to raise fruit flies? I hate fruit flies. I think it would be better to raise crickets, but do what you want.
 
First of all i plan to get some baby mantises next year and i want to "Test" to see if could keep and breed them,and my brother has the poorest sundew ya ever laid eyes on.
 
  • #10
oops,by "them" i mean the Fruit flys
 
  • #11
Make sure you don't let them escape into the house. I'd be feeling really sorry for you if you did, as I usedto have a big problem with fruit flies. Good luck breeding them
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  • #12
AEA, I was going to hatch a mantis case for my vivariums last spring (I had an eggcase of the African mantid Sphidromantis lineolea) but I didn't mist the egg case often enough and eventually forgot to keep doing it (it takes two months or more of misting at least once and preffereably twice daily). For a better chance, I suggest buying a humidifier and timer set to run 1 hour dawn and dusk so the egg case terrarium (or clear rubbermaid bin) is kept evenly humid at the right times (and allowed to dry out while the lights were on).  I have a great book called "The Praying Mantids" by Preet Wells Wells & Hurd it's published by the Johns Hopkins University Library so it's quality info and very indepth (500-600 pages) on every aspect of mantid life, raising and phisiology, it also details experiments that you can conduct should you choose to. It's also a very costly book, mine was $112 with shipping from Amazon.com

Also be sure to buy a bunch (at least a pack of 100) of those quart size containers I mentioned because you must seperate each baby mantid from the others or they will eat eachother alive in a frenzy of death and violence (same with their breeding). Each egg case can have 50-400 nymph mantids (all with hungry mouths) so you'll need a good storage facility til you raise them to roughly their 3rd morph before they're large enough to sell to other hobbyists.  BTW I'll buy some when you get them to their 3rd morph/exoskeleton shed stage-private message or email me if you wanna work something out!

Nathaniel, I've been fooling with fruitflies off and on for a couple years or so, and I've never had a problem with them at all, but like I said, I use the Fruit flies from the reptile shop who are unable to fly and cause trouble in the house.
To have a problem with fruitflies you need something for them to eat as they only live about 200 hours-did you have lots rotten fruit/food in your trashcan or sink garbage disposal? I'm not trying to imply anything, I'm just curious as to how you could get an infestation and become such a problem for you.
 
  • #13
Put a compost bin in your back yard and start composting. You'll get all sorts of bugs including fruit flies. Plus you can use the compost in your vegetable or flower garden.
 
  • #14
Well, I guess it was because I had left som caramel apples in the back of my food cabinet and forgot it, is what got things started. Even after throwing away the apples, and killing the hundreds of flies around them, I still had a lot of flies in the house. They would get into the pots of my nepenthes and the pitchers
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