Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I am trying to breed these nasty little critters for my chams and other lizards but I am not doing so well. Years ago I remember finding a recipe of sorts for house fly media. I remember that the formula contained dog food and milk but I cant remember what else it included. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Please keep in mind that I am talking about House Flies and not fruit flies.

Thanks,

Brad

The only fly rearing article I know of is on Adcham (http://www.adcham.com/html/insects/insects-fly-rearing.html), but in an experiment I did, I put some houseflies (20 or so) in a glass jar and had 1/2" of fruit fly medium (my recipe) and so far I have fly eggs and lots of little maggots... Not sure what's gonna happen in a few weeks, I don't know of anyone raising them this way (I just thought I'd give it a shot since I'm not about to go through the process that the adcham thing involves to get houseflies...). They cost next to nothing at Skipios, if you need flies, check them out.
-----
Tyler Stewart
Las Vegas NV
www.BLUEBEASTREPTILE.com

Wanna hear something funny? By accident, I raised some houseflies to my dismay when trying to raise Fruitflies when I was a newbie at Darts! I put a culture of ff medium together for my darts and instead of using nylon at the top on the lid, I used paper towels. The new larve made the paper towel really wet(and ripped it a little), and house flies got to the culture and laid eggs without me knowing. A few weeks later, I was saying to myself "WOW! Thats some medium! Look at the size of those FF larve!!" Then they made their Pupaes(is it called?)and I thought "WOW! check out them suckers! That's one gigantic pupae, good going Maggie!" Then, a little while later I was screaming "What happened to my fruitflies! How'd they get so big?!?" Realizing only then when compared to the other real fruit flies emerging in the same culture that I had houseflies as well! If you ever have trouble culturing houseflies, just do it the Maggie way...stumbling along all the way till you're running through the house screaming something like "...we got fruitflies from hell!"

-Maggie,
How many houseflies did you get from it? Was it a pre-made fruit fly medium or one you made yourself? That's weird.... I had never heard of that and figured I'd give it a shot. Most of my flies died right away (within a few days) but I had a few live almost 2 weeks in there. You can see the eggs and near the bottom on the glass the little maggots. There's no fruit flies at all in mine. Maybe I'll have to try again if it works on a larger scale. Thanks for the response.
-----
Tyler Stewart
Las Vegas NV
www.BLUEBEASTREPTILE.com

Hey Tyler: Wierd is my middle name! It was Edflymeat media. There were at least 10 maggots, and 5 flies before I even knew what they were. I got disgusted and put them into the Carnivourous pitchers, so I didn't let anymore develop. I'm sure more were coming though. If wild ff have been accused of laying into flightless cultures thereby producing flying ff in cultures one was expecting to be flightless, then we can imagine that this could happen with houseflies. I do agree, this is strange(at least this thought helps me to feel better about my airheadedness in not realizing what they were). I'm sure you know Dart froggers are always looking at materials to top the culture with. Paper towels have been known to let through "others" you didn't start with, and when people seemed to stop using this is as a topper then you'd hear their problems passing. My best guess has to be that wild flies got into the culture via the paper towels and went to work from eggs, to larve, to pupae all the way to the housefly! Be interesting to see what your experiment tells us is possible! Maggie

It's all very interesting. I think I might try that adcham thing but maybe on a smaller scale. I do have plenty of lizards that would love to have flies but I'm not sure if I would want to get that serious.

Tyler, if you would, please keep us up to date on how the fruit fly media worked with the house flies.

Thanks again!

Brad

You should also get in contact with Ed and Liddy Kammer @ Kammerflauge Kreations. They sell house flies on their website, and would probably be able to help you in this regard.

Larry Lockard

If you want to try to raise your own flies, by all means go for it and tell us what happens, but you can also get tons of flies for cheap from Skippios. It cost like $2 for an ounce of puppa (at least 1000) and shipping is like $5. Get a few ounces and you'll have more flies than you'll know what to do with (at least I diddn't know what to do with so many flies!) Good luck with whatever you decide!