fly cost

[Darth Mantis]

I was wondering how much do you guys usually spend on larger flies in a month. Larger like blue bottle flies or house flies? what do you do to keep costs down.

 

[Introvertebrate]

Do you know anyone in your area who's also into the hobby?  Ordering larger quantities of flies is more affordable if you can split the cost.

 

[Predatorhousepet]

I have 36 individual mantids and I buy 500 bluebottle and 500 housefly pupae every 3 or 4 weeks. I usually buy fly pupae from mantisplace.com as she carries larger amounts and has the lowest prices I have found so far. If I bought 500 of each separately they would come to $9.90 (+$7.20 shipping) but she has a combo deal for $9.25 so with shipping that comes to $16.45 for 1000 total pupae. I keep them in a mini fridge that I adjusted the temp to the warmest setting, which is just low enough to keep them dormant. When I need adult flies I put 70 to 100 pupae in a 32oz deli cup with food, water gel crystals and excelsior or a small strip of egg crate for the flies to climb on. They hatch in one to three days and when I need to get some out for feeding I put the whole cup in the fridge for 20 to 30 minutes to slow them down then pull as many as I need out with dental forceps and put them in the mantids cage or just hand feed them with the tweezers. If the flies start to wake up before I am done I just put them back in the fridge for a few minutes. If I have to be away on feeding day I put 3 or 4 pupae in the mantids cage ahead of time so at least one hatches a day or two later.

When you give flies food and water they can live several weeks like that. In the fridge, the housefly pupae start to lose viability after a week and almost none hatch after 3 weeks so when they have been dormant in the fridge a while I take the unused pupae and hatch the rest while they are still able to. Bluebottles are more resistant to cold so they maintain viability up to 3 or 4 weeks in the fridge. It is hard to make them last more than a month so I only buy what I can use in a month (factoring in that a good portion will end up being duds.)

 

[Synapze]

They hatch in one to three days and when I need to get some out for feeding I put the whole cup in the fridge for 20 to 30 minutes to slow them down then pull as many as I need out with dental forceps and put them in the mantids cage or just hand feed them with the tweezers.

20-30 minutes? How long do they stay stunned?

All this time I've thought 3 minutes was the max and I've never tried to push the envelope... no wonder they wake up so fast on me! ?

 

[Predatorhousepet]

I've left the cup in the fridge all day when I forgot I put it in there and they flies were still ok. You can actually store adult flies in the fridge for several days without issue. You can also stun them in the freezer too which works faster but you have to be super careful to take them out before they get frozen solid, not more than 1 or 2 minutes in the freezer at most. Blue bottle flies are a lot more tolerant of the cold than houseflies, I have actually had a BB fly wake up after I left it in the freezer too long and it froze. That's a lot less likely to happen with house flies. 

Flies will stay knocked out for a few minutes, only about 3 to 5 minutes at the most, they start to wake up once they warm up. But if you keep putting them back in the fridge for a few minutes before they get a chance to fully wake up they will stay stunned longer.

 

[john57]

It has been my experience that house flies are much more fragile environment wise. House flies can not handle the heat as well as blue bottle can. Black soldier fly hardly slow down in the fridge and seems to last a long time.