Having your own fruit fly culture has never been easier! This fruit fly culture kit will make feeding your pets a breeze! It allows "regular mouth" mason jars to be used for culturing, seeding and feeding purposes. Ants, spiderlings, jumping spiders, and many other pets love fruit flies.
Please note; a healthy diet consists of variety, so it's also not recommended to feed on only one insect for prolonged periods.
**Orders options allow you to get multiple combinations of "Growing lids" and "Harvesting Lids," each lid has a fine plastic mesh for ventilation and a small opening in the centre with the corresponding CAP to close it.
**Our favourite configuration is the "4 Grow + 1 Harvest Lids", as this allows us to start a new culture once weekly, have a whole month rotation and use one jar for harvesting and seeding.
Notice: Mason jars and flies not inlcuded.
So how come we don't include the mason jars? Such are heavy and expensive to ship; it is better to get them at your local grocery or home improvement store. We recommend 1L tall mason jars for growing and the smaller 250/125mL jars for harvesting; the smaller glass jar vials (feeding jars) you see in the photos above are best for "seeding" a new mason jar and feeding flies into an ant keeping outworld, the arboreal glass towers or the Duo & Tri spider enclosures.
In summary:
The grow lid allows for flies to reproduce (be cultured in a mason jar); you will need "culture media" and a surface area agent for them to thrive, the top of the lid has a port that allows a small glass jar vial to extract flies for feeding or to seed a new culture, the port also allows another mason jar with a harvesting lid to extract as many flies as possible that can then be frozen, this way flies can be offered dead but fresh to small ant colonies with ease (can also be used for seeding a new culture).
The opening on top also allows you to regularly deposit a minimal amount of water into the media, preventing such from dehydrating, as this is key to prolonging the life of the culture.
We suggest starting a fresh new culture once a week as they produce new flies within two weeks and last around four weeks each. With this schedule, you will always have a backup culture and time in case of culture failure. Combining the growing lid with the harvesting lid or seeding glass jar vial makes the perpetuation process straightforward and practical while diminishing escapes.
** It is highly recommended to coat at least 1cm of the mason's inner mouth with petroleum jelly to ensure larvae (small tiny worms) do not attempt to escape through the mesh; once the larvae have eaten enough of the media, it will climb and look for a place to pupate, the jelly prevents them from climbing to far up.
The growing lid should have the port opening extruding upwards, and the harvesting lid should have the port inwards; the images above reflect such.
UV light usage: fruit flies are highly attracted to UV light wavelengths; if you want to speed up the process or transfer a large number of flies into a seeding or harvesting jar, you can use a UV light on such, and flies will rush out of the growing jar.
Freezer method: especially in the ant-keeping hobby, sometimes it is more practical to offer flies dead rather than live and running all over the place, for example, to feed a small colony directly inside the test tube. Using a small harvesting mason jar, extract as many flies as needed, and place the jar in the freezer for 5 to 10 minutes; this will kill the flies and be ready to serve.
More information on how to culture and recipes are coming soon here.
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Regular mouth mason jars measure:
-Ineer diameter: 60mm (2 - 3/8")
-Outer diameter: 70m (2 - 3/4"); measure the top bigger diameter of the metal cap.
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But why fruit flies? Fruit flies have a very high amount of protein and nutritional value compared to other feeder insects; they are relatively easy to care for and small enough for colonies of ants and jumping spiders. In addition, being small makes it easy to measure or ration the servings without cutting or chopping large insects down (for example, cutting a mealworm into small sections). They also tend to have fewer mould issues when left inside test tubes, formicaria or enclosures.
If you want to read more in-depth scientific facts about fruit flies, we suggest the following links:
The University of Washington - An Introduction to Drosophila melanogaster
The University of Kentucky - Fruit Flies (Drosophila) and also Development of the Fruit Fly