houseflies?

[hawaiianice99]

yes this is another feeder question.
does anybody feed houseflies, i found some websites that sell feeders but they are meant for spiders.
just asking cuz i caught a fly once and my cham went nuts following it around but he did get a good hunt in by following him. he got it in a couple of minutes.

 

[Heika]

Flies are great food for chams.

Easy to gutload flies, too, because they eat anything. When the fly poo is the same color as your gutload, you can be pretty sure they are ready to be fed..

There are a couple places that sell them that I have used. My favorite is spiderpharm.. great people to do business with. Grubco sells maggots, and are easy to do business with too. I like to order the super sampler every now and again.

http://www.spiderpharm.com/feeders/insects.htm
http://www.grubco.com/index.cfm

You might want to be careful about feeding a lot at once. Some chameleons get intimidated and then annoyed by four trillion flies loose in their cage. Plus, the flies will eat cham poo and lose all the virtues of the tons of gutload they just finished eating. An easy way to control how many flies go into the cage is by freezing the container the flies are in for a couple minutes. The cold slows them down to a crawl.

 

[Edward Kim]

Hello,

As Heika has stated, they are great feeders but have short lifespands and are extremely hard to handle. Unfortunately genetic manipulations have not been conducted with houseflies to produce a flightless phenotype (cross fingers) . I too place the whole culture in the fridge for 4 to 5 minutes to slow them down prior to feedings. Here is where I get my flies try the blue bottle flies they are much larger than the common house fly.

http://www.mantisplace.com/feederinsects.html#BBP

Cheers,

Ed

 

[Tygerr]

Unfortunately genetic manipulations have not been conducted with houseflies to produce a flightless phenotype (cross fingers)

I think that would ruin the attraction of houseflies as a feeder for me. One of the reasons I like them is because of how well my chams respond to flying feeders. Sure, if they were flightless, they would be easy to dispense to my chams, but I already have a whole selection of flightless feeders that are easy to gutload. What I don't have is a wide selection of flying feeders that are easy to gutload, and it's the flying ones that really stimulate my chams.

 

[Edward Kim]

To each his own

 

[mczoo]

I love feeding flies and my chams love them!!!

I have been feeding houseflies as a secondary supplimental feeder for a few months now. i have found chams can not resist them I buy mine through Mantis place as well and they just reduced their prices.

i am working on a better transport/food to cage regimen. that is my only complaint. When they hatch i "freeze" the whole lot of them divide them into 20 containers with food and water sponges and feed off the entire container to chams.

My montium get houseflies (he is only 4 months old)

My jacksons about 20g each eat the blue bottle flies. They are bigger and seem a little slower to me.

if you oder from mantis place get their fly food and at least humitdity foam to keep the flies hydrated and lid tops with aluminum wire the containers are availble at GFS or other food wholesalers.

check some of my old posts for more info. I was clueless and asked a lot of the questions you will need to know

Good luck

Sean