@Ramona A quick answer is no one cultures bottle flies/blowflies ( just Melanogaster and Hydei fruit fly species primarily), and we simply buy fly pupae online. A few have had limited success culturing bottle flies but was not repeatable by them, or anyone who tried. Houseflies are said to be easier, but due to their much smaller size few have tried culturing them.
Culturing bottle flies
outdoors is the only method that has been successful for members, but with winter in full force is not a option. Indoors typically is a very smelly effort (rotten meat, sour milk, rotten dog food, etc) that ends with dead flies before, or at, the pupae stage (mostly due to excess moisture). See some threads below (and more can be found searching the forum)...
For scientists in lab settings there are various papers/articles that have been published. Most however require some form of peer approved access (with previously published journal/article work) and/or available by paying a fee per article (often $15-$30+ per article).
If that sounds interesting I would recommend searching from NCBI using the
PubMed database for best results. I feel I must warn you though you can spend many hours trying to find the proper keywords for articles - and then even longer afterwards trying to decipher the overly complex jargon. Also the articles are just that parts of published journals and books (and can span several issues), so several articles are very limited. For instance "Insect Colonization and Mass Production" while the introduction chapter can be
purchased online, it requires buying
the published book for the other chapters that would explain anything. I have no idea what is in the book either as little is shown anywhere, so I doubt it would be a idea source.
The few free useful articles that can be found are quite old (1940's),
A Simple Method for Rearing Blowflies Without Meat, and
Rearing Houseflies and Blowflies on Dog Biscuit (not complete, a page short of the whole article). I have found and gotten access to other fly culturing articles that are paid, but those I had are basically the same information. A few that were different required access to lab grade chemicals or setups so were of no real use either.
After pulling up links to the articles I did find one person on another forum posted a
quick guide to culturing bottle flies, but says it is messy and smelly (soured milk and dog food). It follows the setup many of us have tried unsuccessfully too so I am not sure how much success is possible with it. Many things are also missing such as required heat temperatures, moisture/humidity levels, etc in the various life stages which are the problems that tend to occur for us that tried.
A great alternative feeder is black solider flies (Hermetia illucens) that several members lately have cultured many generations of without problems (or smell). See below for how to get started, and links to other related things.
Best of luck, but if you wish to just buy bottle fly pupae then
BugsInCyberspace,
MantisPlace,
PanTerra Pets, and
MantidKingdom are the places to try. That is unless you want mass quantities of several thousands (pupae are only good for about 3 weeks though) then you can buy them from the source which is
Forked Tree Ranch.
