# Making Fruit Fly Cultures



## brooklyndartfrogs (Nov 19, 2005)

How many cultures do you make and how often?
I'm trying to get an idea of the quantity of cultures to make and how often.
Does anyone have a system where they make a certain amount per viv?
Or is it all guess work?
I find myself making to many cultures and having alot of them go bad.
Thanks,
Andy


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## Scott (Feb 17, 2004)

I've made as many as 25 per week once upon a time.

I now need to make 8 a week.

I make enough so that I never ever quite use everything. I keep all of my culture weekly batches in one container (a cardboard box with low edges on the side). I normally use cultures about 3 or 4 weeks.

I *always* keep developing cultures in a different area than feeding cultures (less chance of massive mite transfers).

I *always* make a new group of cultures from the group of cultures that I am pulling out to start feeding from.

So I always have 2 groups of cultures developing. I pull out the "oldest" developing culture, and use them to seed the "newest" culture.

This way you never shortchange yourself in having new cultures bc/ you set up the new ones before you start feeding from the ready ones. Hope that makes sense.

I'm extremely anal about the process. I always (ok, 95% of the time) make my cultures on Sunday night - if not it's Monday night.

Hope this helps!

s


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## GSXR_MURRHEE (Sep 16, 2006)

It depends really, right now I make about 5 cultures about every two weeks to feed about 25 or so frogs and they last about 3-4 weeks. But I start them off with lots of flies so I have huge booms, and rotate between them so they can repopulate a little between feedings. It just takes a while to perfect what works for you. 

Do you know why your cultures are going bad? Do you have problems with mold or overpopulation, or are they just not taking off?


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## asilsdorf (Sep 7, 2005)

For melanogaster FF I make two cultures every week. This is for about 30 frogs and works out to 4 developing cultures and 12 active cultures to feed out. This is assuming I keep a culture for 8 weeks which is the maximum I allow to avoid mites.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

One of the things to watch is when you are using flies to start the new cultures. If you use flies from the first boom of flies to set up the new cultures then you are selecting flies which develop rapidly but are intolerant of culture conditions post the first boom which can then cause the culture to crash/go bad after the first mass of flies hatches from the pupae. To avoid this, you want to use flies from a new culture and combine them with flies from an older culture (if you only select from an older culture you can accidently select for flies that develop more slowly but are also more tolerant to the conditions in older cultures. 

Some comments,

Ed


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## Rain_Frog (Apr 27, 2004)

funny that you've brought that up Ed-- I've purposely used flies from an old culture in order to increase hardiness / tolerance of waste build up in cultures.


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