need to know how to maintain a culture of fruit flies

[alex21]

HI,

I was wondering if someone good give me some advice as to how to maintain a cutlure of fruit flies for several weeks, or even months. I have heard some people say that with a small vial of fruit flies, you could take care of it and grow a large family and maintain reproducing them for several weeks to even months. That way, you could have a nice supply of fruit flies for spiders or other types of invert pets for a long period of time. how can i do this? i have purchased several times fruit fly vials from reptilefood.com but the vials don't last me more than a couple of weeks. can someone let me know how i can make the supply of fruit flies last longer than that?

Let me know, thanks

 

[PutingSapot]

maybe the vials you bought are small.. or maybe you feed all the adults and no more eggs would be laid.

I just started with dart frogs and my main feeder are fruit flys. Mine produce about a thousand for a couple of weeks then slows down, using a 32 oz plastic container. I start new culture every week for melanogaster and hydei.
Then stop for a week or two if I have enough. I started using premixed fruit fly media. Now I make my own media. There's a lot of recipe for fruit fly media out there.

You might want to culture your own.

 

[Thoth]

You have to culture them to have them last, a kit with everything you need for culturing them with wingless fruit flies mutants

https://www2.carolina.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?jdeAddressId=&catalogId=10101&storeId=10151&productId=361&langId=-1&parent_category_rn=1285|81|989|451

Its easy enough to culture them, though after teaching a mendelian genetics lab one quickly learns the the tough thing is to get rid of them, when you have escapees or if a wildtype flies get in your cultures things get fun.

 

[PutingSapot]

some tips from experience of mine:

don't mixed no flight cultures to make a new one, you'll end up with flying culture.

don't expose your culture to regular house fly, unless you want them.

 

[luther]

How to maintain a culture of fruit flies? In my experience you should do everything in your power to eradicate them from the house. That seems to work for me.

 

[Thoth]

some tips from experience of mine:

don't mixed no flight cultures to make a new one, you'll end up with flying culture.

That happens because there are several different gene mutations, genotypes, that give the same phenotype, inability to fly. Unless you are getting these drosophila from a biological supplies house, you don't know what mutation you have and if mix two different mutations you get flies that heterozygous, one copy of each gene, for these traits and since these mutations are recessive you'll end up with flies that fly.
Sorry for the impromptu genetics lesson, old habits die hard

I'm with luther though after suffering for a year with an infestation of drosophila with different colored eyes, just kill the bugger.