What to feed house flies on?

[Cirith Ungol]

Anyone have an idea what would be good food for flies so that they are stuffed when I feed them off to my avic juvies?

I've hatched flies for a while now but only now it dawned on me that they're basically empty on goodies all the other feeders provide.

 

[ScorpDude]

Rotting fruit n stuff

 

[Cirith Ungol]

Rotting fruit n stuff

Nah I wanna try and avoid a mould farm... now I'm considering if some sugar water and dog food pellets will do the trick.. I guess I have to try.

 

[Gigas]

ANYTHING !! lol, ya they eat practically everything, dog foods a good idea but you have to include some rotting fruit ir sugar water and dont use w/c ones IMO bacteria farm in themselves. sprinkle some cricky gut loader on the surface of the food

 

[Cirith Ungol]

Nah, the maggots/flies are farmed so they should be pretty clean... well, as clean as flies can be . Yeah I guess I just need to try my way through this one...

 

[rm90]

Why would you feed them stuff that is getting moldy and rotting? Cause they are eating it then when you feed it to your animal its now inside of HIM.

 

[Gigas]

but when outside the flies body , the rotting food can pick up fungal spores and bacteria which would on multiply on rotting food in the prescence of oxygen, if eaten fresh they arent there to begin with and cant multiply

 

[Thoth]

In the lab we used feed the blowflies (Sarcophaga bullata) sugar cubes and water from a bottle that used a paper towel as wick (used to perform brain surgery on them). They will eat anything, for something more nutritious than sugar dry dog food or human cereal should be fine and alwys provide water (found out the hard way they are very sensitive to dehydration).

To get them to lay egg a piece of fish or beef liver worked well and the maggots thrived (problem is it stank do it out doors). If you place a dish on top of the liver/fish the maggots when ready to pupate will crawl into it and form pupas there, making it easier to collect and transfer them to the container you want to keep the adult flies in. <added by edit> Also the adults once emerged from the pupae live about a month (more or less)

This is the type of enclosure we put the pupa in when before they eclosed and the adults emerged and we kept the adults in there. Real easy to make its a 5 gal bucket with a cloth mesh attached to the top we used rubber bands) and a hole in the side where a sleeve was attached, which we could reach in and get flies with out the flies escaping and tied off when not in use.

 

[Cirith Ungol]

Thanks Toth! That's good to know! Though I won't raise them, I can buy them cheap, 250 maggots for about $2.5, so I can skip the stinky business And one of those tins lasts me ages if kept in the frigde. I only take about 10 pupae out at a time and put them in room temperature, and (if I'm not mistaken) about 4-5 days later the flies emerge.