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About Flightless Fruit Flies and Feeding Them to Your Pet |
| by: Mark Springer |
From The Silkworm Shop
www.silkwormshop.com
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About Our Fruit Flies
The Silkworm Shop offers flightless fruit flies that are high in protein and an excellent
feeder for a huge variety of small and baby animals, including reptiles, birds, spiders, mantis and amphibians. They are very useful and healthy as feeders for aquarium fish, which are particularly attracted by the fluttering flies. Surface feeding live bearers and bettas eat the flies voraciously.
Our fruit flies are Wingless Drosophila.
They are about 1/8 inch long and are completely harmless. These flies are genetically bred to be flightless, so you don't need to worry about escaped flies buzzing around your head. And, these fruit flies are USDA approved.
Fruit fly cultures are self-contained and require no maintenance. Drosophilia's life cycle is between 12-15 days, and it takes approximately 14 days before a culture will start producing thousands of fruit flies for one month or more (until all feeding medium has been consumed). Your fruitfly culture will arrive at about 14 days old (the initial production stage) and will last for a month or more.
The Silkworm Shop supplies extra-large 32 oz. cultures. Don't confuse these with the over-priced tiny vials commonly found elsewhere. Our fruit fly cultures contain twice as much medium, which means you'll get twice as many flies. These quality cultures generate thousands of Fruit Flies.
Culture Care
Larvae will continually pupate from eggs laid by the adults in the culture. It is important to allow your adult flies two days in the culture before being fed to your critter. These adult flies will be busy laying more eggs and ensuring that you will have a successful supply of flies. It is also important to feed the flies to your animals regularly so the flies don't reach the natural end of their lives and pollute the substrate. It is best to keep the fruit fly culture at room temperature (around 70° F). The higher the temperature, the higher the bacterial growth. But, you may want to raise or lower the temperature to control the lifespan of your
culture (see next section).
Controlling the Lifespan of Your Culture
By controlling temperature, it's possible to control the rate of reproduction.
Optimum reproductive rate occurs at temperatures of approximately 80° F. At around 60° F, reproductive rate slows, thus allowing longer feeding time and longer use from a single culture. Obviously, the more flies you use, the higher you will want the reproductive rate to be.
Feeding to Your Pets
When it's feeding time for your pets, tap the container lightly on something hard. This will cause the flies to fall to the bottom of the container so they won't escape when you take the lid off. Then, simply remove the lid and tap the container over your animal's home until the desired number of fruit flies fall out. If dusting the flies with vitamins, tap them into a plastic bag and dust.
Buy Flightless Fruit Flies Here
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