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yeatzee

yeatzee

Well-known member
Joined
Sep 9, 2008
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Location
SoCal ---> Temecula
I just thought I'd post here my bad recent experience with this fruit fly website. I had an unexpected hatch of an ooth laid from my since dead female S. Limbata. Of course in the middle of winter meaning no bugs outside to feed them with. I did some research and with a little help from a few forum members i dived into the whole fruit fly culture stuff head first. Fruit fliesinc.com attracted me mainly because of the good price for how much I got which was one active culture, the stuff to make 12 more cultures, and 12 32.oz cups with the bag of aspen fiber. Also said to be included was a "caresheet" and "Easy-To-Follow Instructions." Sounds fine right, well it would have been if they included this caresheet and instructions which were supposed to be included according to their website so i could make more cultures. I thought no big deal I'll feed my nymphs because they havent eaten, and email the guys there for the instructions. Well I continued to feed my nymphs careful to not use to many and run dry the culture provided. Well three emails later with a week+ passed no response. To make this even worse the provided culture is turning bad, with the aspen fiber towards the bottom of the container turning greenish and the media itself brown when it was a very light color.....about the same color as the aspen fiber. I'll insert a picture later but I just thought I'd let you guys know. So now I have a bunch of 32.oz containers and supplies waiting to be turned into cultures, and 1 provided culture with dieing fruit flies inside of it, and of course my hungry nymphs :angry:

<_<

 
yeatzee said:
I just thought I'd post here my bad recent experience with this fruit fly website. I had an unexpected hatch of an ooth laid from my since dead female S. Limbata. Of course in the middle of winter meaning no bugs outside to feed them with. I did some research and with a little help from a few forum members i dived into the whole fruit fly culture stuff head first. Fruit fliesinc.com attracted me mainly because of the good price for how much I got which was one active culture, the stuff to make 12 more cultures, and 12 32.oz cups with the bag of aspen fiber. Also said to be included was a "caresheet" and "Easy-To-Follow Instructions." Sounds fine right, well it would have been if they included this caresheet and instructions which were supposed to be included according to their website so i could make more cultures. I thought no big deal I'll feed my nymphs because they havent eaten, and email the guys there for the instructions. Well I continued to feed my nymphs careful to not use to many and run dry the culture provided. Well three emails later with a week+ passed no response. To make this even worse the provided culture is turning bad, with the aspen fiber towards the bottom of the container turning greenish and the media itself brown when it was a very light color.....about the same color as the aspen fiber. I'll insert a picture later but I just thought I'd let you guys know. So now I have a bunch of 32.oz containers and supplies waiting to be turned into cultures, and 1 provided culture with dieing fruit flies inside of it, and of course my hungry nymphs :angry: <_<
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Yeatzee, if you have enough flies to spare to make at least one culture up, I'd do it now... with or without their instructions (that may never come). Take about 1/3 to 1/2 cup of the dry media mix you got and put it in one of the new culture cups. In a seperate measuring cup, mix together about 1/2 to 3/4 cup of warm (not hot) water and about 1/8 cup of plain white vinegar if you have it. The vinegar is optional, but I like to use it as an added measure to ward off mold. Pour the water/vinegar mixture into the culture cup with the dry media, and swirl it around to mix. It should be runny and liquidy at first... then "set up" after about 5 minutes to where it should stay where it is in the bottom instead of following gravity when you tip the container.

Then take a pouch of active yeast that you buy in the baking section of the grocery store, and sprinkle some evenly on top of the solidified culture mix. Add some excelsior, then your flies, cap with the ventilated lid, and you're done.

But you need to get a new culture going asap if you want to have some from this lot in the future. It takes several weeks for cultures to breed and produce new flies, and you can't make up the time from when you start a culture. If you don't have enough ff's to start a culture without exhausting your feeding supply, you need to either see if your local PetCo has some you can buy and use them... or order some more online. Good luck.

PS... It's normal for the culture media to turn darker and diminish as the ff culture ages. But it's not good for it to turn green.

 
yeatzee said:
ISo now I have a bunch of 32.oz containers and supplies waiting to be turned into cultures, and 1 provided culture with dieing fruit flies inside of it, and of course my hungry nymphs :angry:

<_<
Click to expand...
Don't despair, Yeatzee!

You do need to activate a couple of those cultures ASAP, though, before all of your flies die. If each "portion" consists of about 1/2 cup of sweetened potato flakes (with or without a mold inhibitor) all you have to do is to shake it up in the 32 oz cup, add a cup of water, stir it up and add a pinch of yeast and stir it in. If the mixture is stiff when all of the water has been absorbed, add a little more water, but not enough to make it runny. You seem to be in an emergency situation, so you might want to add a little booze or liqueur to speed up the fermentation process. Quality control is very important at this stage, and I usually sample an ounce or two of the alcoholic beverage to make sure that it is up to standard.

Since you appear to be having a mold problem, for whatever reason, make up another culture as above, but before adding the yeast and booze, boil the whole mess in a pan (just as you would "instant potatoes," Urghhh!) and let it cool in the fridge before adding the yeast and booze. If that one does better than the normally prepared ones, boil the rest as you make them up.

If you think that the excelsior is causing the problem (though I seriously doubt it) you can substitute the coffee filters mentioned in a recent thread or sturdy non-metallic screen. The latter is moisture resistant, reusable and gives much better purchase for the maggots when they are about to pupate than excelsior in my experience.

When you come to buy your next fruit flies, you might want to consider Forum members like Obregon or Hibiscusmile.

I generally don't use companies that don't give some sort of snail mail addy, because I usually check for a telephone # on Yellow Pages and I like to know how long it will take for priority mail to reach me. I notice that Fruit Flies Inc does not even mention what state it ships from.

Hope this helps.

One more thought, since you are in a hurry on this. It's easy to add more water if your culture is too thick, but if it is too watery, buy some "instant potato flakes" and add them bit by bit until you have the right consistency.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Never used them before, but I bet it's the holidays causing at least part of the delay.

What materials did they send for making more cultures? If the media was included, perhaps you could get started anyway.

You could also try one of the recipes found here for the media. Masa and potato flake based mixes seem to be the most popular.

 
You may want to make quick note of your experience in the other breeder's feedback, but I wouldn't blame them too much, I imagine forgetting the instructions would be fairly easy. With some 20/20 hindsight, next time it would probably be a good idea to check on this board as well for information on making the cultures. I think you'll do alright though

 
Going to scan and PM you some instructions and a ff care sheet that I got from another place online when I ordered ff's. The instructions should be similar, and it will give you an idea anyway...

 
I read the post on culturing fruitflies, and the links to other posts on the subject, and my cultures have been doing fine. Even the one's that has some deaths have plenty of activity in them now, I think many of them got drunk and passed out, but are back to work B)

I would think that in Temecula there would be a good reptile store that sells fruitflies, and probably pinhead crickets also.

I try to avoid petco and petsmart for fruitflies, as most I've seen have alot of dead flies in their vials, and I like dealing with a reptile dealer that is familiar with fruitflies and not just selling them.

I also googled for 'fruitfly culturing' on the internet and got lots of care info from that.

Just stick a bag of patatoes back under a shelf and forget about it, and I almost guarantee you'll have fruitflies in no time :)

 
Ha!

Well I have still not had a response from this website so I made 2 cultures with slight differences to see which works best. Im hoping they explode like my current one has. I'll insert pics when my computer stops trying to melt my SD card :rolleyes:

We had a nice little petshop pretty close to where I live..... but the economy......*sigh*

Im not aware of anymore close but I'll look into it so if i get in another pinch I'll have an escape plan.

 
Some of you sure make culturing fruit flys so much harder than it really is. Sorry to hear about your woes.

 
I wouldn't worry too much about the green ###### in the culture, as you've probably realized by now, it won't bother the flies.

Every one of my culture took off like crazy, and there were several recipes that I used.

The one thing, and these were my first cultures, that I learned is not to make it runny cause the stuff will fall on top of your flies when you try to tip them out of the container, and that's not good.

It's been about 2 weeks since I started all my cultures, and two days ago I poured about half an inch of fruitflies, in the bottom of a clean empty 32 oz deli cup, and froze them off so they wouldn't eat the culture material that I have left. I still have a couple hundred ff's in the cups that I poured the dead one's out of, so plenty of food for the mantis'.

I am feeding the dead FF'ls to my fish, and they seem to enjoy them :)

I found a couple roachs the other day, and caught them and put them in the mantis jars. The roaches were probably close to an inch, almost as big as my largest mantis, but they aren't there anymore, so I suspect they made a good dinner for the fella's :)

I will start a Hydei culture tommorrow, and since they're slower growing I hope to not be over run with them too soon, and have larger food for my mantis'.

 
yeatzee said:
At what instar should I be making a Hydei culture?
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Larger mantises like S. limbata can be started on Hydei! That's what I fed the L1s I got from Arkanis. So I think you should do it sooner than later.

I also used pinheads and am currently feeding L3-4 crickets to the L3 & L4 mantises. I think the L4s are already too big to take FFs at all...and can tackle the 1/4"+ crickets now.

 
Alright.......i've got a good supply of crickets locally so I think im just going to skip hydei fruit flies. My only problem is that i HATE crickets compared to flies. After L3 what flies would be appropriate since i would much rather start a culture of flies than use crickets. Once the flies start coming back outside Im just going to catch them since there is always a steady supply.....but from now till than what type of fly would be good and how do I breed em?

 
Well guys I just thought I should straighten some things out, now that I have the facts. I Ordered my hydei a couple days ago, and left a special request basically asking for the directions for both the melano's and the Hydei's. I just got my order which was one culture of D. Hydei. Tony added a second culture for free, and the instructions. He left a note saying that for what ever reason he was unable to email my email account, and that he added a culture for my troubles.

I agree I was way too quick to judge this great guy.

After all is said and done I definitely recommend Fruitfliesinc.com for any fruit fly needs, and I hope to do business with him again.

 
yeatzee said:
Well guys I just thought I should straighten some things out, now that I have the facts. I Ordered my hydei a couple days ago, and left a special request basically asking for the directions for both the melano's and the Hydei's. I just got my order which was one culture of D. Hydei. Tony added a second culture for free, and the instructions. He left a note saying that for what ever reason he was unable to email my email account, and that he added a culture for my troubles. I agree I was way too quick to judge this great guy.

After all is said and done I definitely recommend Fruitfliesinc.com for any fruit fly needs, and I hope to do business with him again.
Click to expand...
Well, we all want good fruit flies at a great price, don't we? If we didn't, and live in the southwest, we would order from the Fruit Fly Shop (AKA The Silkworm Shop) for excellent quality and service for $8.50 per pot plus shipping.

At $4.00 per pot and an extra pot thrown in, I couldn't resist Fruit Flies Inc's offer. Four pots, including Priority Shipping cost $29.60.

A well sealed carton arrived on time with two pots each of wingless mels (I got to choose the species of my bonus pot), which I hadn't tried before (Mija points out that they are much less "fecund" than their wild progenitors, and she's right, as usual) and two hydei The 32oz pots had a good amount of potato based medium, lots of flies and Way Too Much excelsior, which isn't a problem over the short term, however.

I got an instruction sheet with mine, and in addition to the usual sound information, it advised the buyer "to let the culture rest for a few days." Good advice, and it gives the buyer time to set up some new pots of medium to keep the culture going. The PayPal merchant is listed as a car company, which gave me pause, but whoever is raising these clearly knows what he/she is doing.

I was very pleased with the transaction, particularly since I had been badly burned by a forum member (I won't post his name and the gristly details unless he advertises ffs on the forum again) and can recommend this company, even when they are no longer offering their "special".

 

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