Here's a mini HOW-TO for making fruit fly cultures. I use FF all the time for my dart frogs and I know a lot of you guys feed your chameleon babies with FF so I thought some of you may find this useful.

By no means this is a definitive guide. Over the years, I tried a variety of methods, containers, recipes, etc. This is what works very well for me, so I thought I'd share it with you guys.

1st is the recipe for the media. This is very simple with no frills and it produces extremely well. It's also cheap !


Ingredients

• White Vinegar - The cheapest you can find. No need for Heinz here. Bottom shelf, no name.
• Hot tap Water
• White Sugar
• Brewers yeast - other types of yeast just don't cut it. Be sure to use brewers! (check your local bulk foods store)
• Instant mashed potato flakes (also bulk foods).
• Fleischman's instant yeast

Tools:

• Whisk
• Bowl
• Fruit Fly containers & lids
• Excelsior or Coffee filters

Make a mix of 50/50 water vinegar mixture. Add brewers yeast and sugar. Whisk until dissolved. Add potato flakes until you get a mix of consistency looser then apple sauce.

Let it stand for about 5-10 minutes until it thickens. It should now be as thick as apple sauce. If it isn't add more water/vinegar mixture. If it's too runny, add a bit more potato flakes and let it stand for a few minutes until it thickens.



Add about an inch of the media into the cup. I guess if you're into re-usable then you can use jars or even bottles. I don't like it and I refuse to clean the mess, so I just use the plastic 32oz fruit fly containers with meshed lids. You can get them here



Sprinkle a small pinch of instant yeast on top. Not sure if this actually works, but the popular belief is that the adult flies feed on this. I didn't notice any difference in production or life expectancy when I don't add it...but, it's not expensive, lasts a long time and doesn't really take that much more time, so might as well add it. Just a pinch.



There's probably as many opinions about the filler that you put into your cultures for fruit flies to climb and lay eggs on, as there are media recipes. A lot of people like to use coffee filter paper. Personally I don't. It gets wet, it's flimsy and sometimes falls out. If you like it and it works for you use it, if you like something else use that.



Excelsior works great for me, so that's what I prefer to use. It's expensive if you buy it at a craft store. It's cheap if you get it at a packing place of go to home depot early spring when their water fountains come in Don't ask, just take an empty box with all the excelsior you need and tell the cashier it's empty- they never seem to mind. I did that for a long time, then I needed it in the fall, home depot didn't have any, so I bought a bail of it for about $50. That was 2 years ago. I gave a ton to other people and I still have enough for the next 5 years! Get few guys, get a bail and your excelsior problem will be solved. I don't remember where I bought it tough...somewhere on the web at a packing place.



Make a little ball, shake out any loose threads and pack it into your containers. Make sure you press it into your media. You're now ready to seed your new cultures with fruit flies.



Before you add fruit flies from an old culture, be sure you inspect it for mites. If you have mites, well.... you have a big problem to deal with. I won't get into it here, so lets assume you don't have mites

Few things to remember when making cultures:

• Get yourself good anti-mite paper. Make sure it's fresh.
• Never leave your producing cultures on other surfaces other then the mite paper.
• Don't use very old cultures to make your starter cultures. Try to pick'em at their prime
• When you stack the cultures on the shelf, make sure the lids don't touch.

Add about 100 flies to each new cultures. You can add more, but be warned. Your culture will practically explode with maggots and fruit flies. If you leave too many flies in your culture, it may crash and shorten the useful life of your culture. It's better to add less flies and have it produce for a longer period of time, then have a huge population for a short time.



Above is a melanogaster culture that's packed with maggots. Like I said, you can get more maggots if you seed with larger number of FFs but this will come at a price, so don't be fruit fly greedy It's better for the culture to last you longer, so you don't have to make them as often.

I make my cultures probably once every 3 weeks. I make both melanogasters and hydei's



Here's a good tip that will make your fruit flies last much longer ! When I make new cultures I always make few extra that I don't seed. Just leave them empty. I make them my "Overflow" storage containers. If a fruit fly culture produces more then I can use, I'll throw the excess FFs into the "O" containers where they will be able to survive without a problem. This alleviates the strain on the culture that produces, which makes it last longer. You now also have all the fruit flies that you'll ever need in the overflow. This will also mean that you've SUPER seeded the overflow culture. Which is OK as this is just an "O" culture. It will still be useful for feeding off the adults, but remember it will also explode with a population when it matures. I don't use the Overflow cultures for seeding new ones. I only seed new ones from healthy cultures. The Overflows are great buffers to keep your cultures in check and not crashing. It's also great when your cultures are not ready to produce. Works great for me.



Here's how I keep my cultures. I've been doing it for several years, so I've got it down to a science. Before I needed many more cultures, now with the overflow containers my cultures are much healthier and produce much longer. I typically toss'em out when they still produce. I'd keep'em longer, but after about 3-4 weeks they tend to start to stink. I don't like stinky cultures, so off they go. I put the freshest cultures near the top and older cultures that I'm using to feed on lower shelves.

Hope you find this useful ! I know some of you have tiny chameleon babies, FF make a great starter food for them.

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Nice work Marty!
That was a great thread, and I love to read anything that can save me a couple of bucks.
Quick question...
How do you get FF for your very first culture?
Do you just leave the jars outside to collects wild FF or do you order a culture online?

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Sunshine Chameleons
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First culture you should buy from a reputable place (To avoid mites). The flies you'll get will be genetic mutants with various types a mutations to prevent them from flying (ie. curly wings (very cool, called gliders, fly only few inches), under developed muscles (have wings, but can't fly), lack of wings, etc)

You don't want to use any wild flies and you want to make sure that your media, when it is being made is always covered as it rests, because opportunistic wild flies will lay eggs almost immediately contaminating your media. I had that happen few times and it makes it interesting when they interbreed with the mutated flies and produce flying offspring. Then you open up the container and about 500 flies come out flying

I usually get my starter cultures from Eds Fly Meat or Snail Tail Flies

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you know thats funny because u thought about that because thats exactly something that would happen to me. Marty i have a question from ya, how often do you buy new cultures? The things ive read (from both this write up and other sources) about buying a new culture then seeding them, it seems like once you get a culture that produces well and you keep things clean, and seed new cultures every couple of weeks, in theory it seems like you would never need to buy them again as long as you keep things under control. How easy is this to do? Im thinking about buying a culture just to try to perfect it because i have babies that should hatch in about 4.5 months. How successful have you been in turning one culture into a never ending supply of new cultures. You know what i mean. Awesome write up and i know this will be very useful for many of us that breed chameleons.

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I only buy cultures when I neglect my FFs and don't have enough to feed my animals, have mites or get wild flies interbreeding. Last time I bought a few cultures was probably over 2 years ago, that's because I wanted to try out new (exotic at that time) strains of flies (I think it was D. buzzati and D. mulleri). If you keep your area clean, on mite paper and don't introduce wild populations, then you'll run forever

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Awesome, thats good to know. Also, are there some tips on how to spot mites and prevent them? What is this mite paper you speak of and where can you buy it?

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you have to keep the area clean. I heard that having a fan near your cultures to circulate air helps, since mites like stagnant moist air. I should say it's anti-mite paper and not mite paper my bad... I always call it mite paper.

it's paper laced with some sort of an insecticide. I get it here. I know it sounds bad and no one is bigger freak when it comes to not using any chemicals around my animals, but in this case I make an exception as the paper only touches the bottoms of the containers.

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word of caution, try to always get the mite paper from fresh stock. I got an old batch once and got mites after a preventive switch to the what I thought was 'fresh' paper.

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Great write up!
I have done lots-o-FF clutures and do pretty much what you do, except I use powdered sugar... and add a little spirulina and some bee pollen to the mix. Never used the mite paper though and thankfully haven't had any problems.

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I used to add a bit of spirulina for green/blue animals and even carotenoids for the brightly coloured yellow and reds (I used to extract the pigment from paprika and mix in the oleoresins), but I didn't notice improvement in the coloration. Instead of gut loading, it's probably better to add a bit of spirulina to the vitamins when you dust the flies, though I'm not sure if that's needed as I never tried it myself or know the ramifications. I did notice that spirulina medium yielded much less flies though.

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