# fruit fly mites



## ACEFROG (Jan 1, 2016)

hi, brand new to keeping dart frogs. i have 2 cultures going, i have read about mites. is this something that can overtake my house and eat my kids at night? (joking) can mites become hosts on humans or become an infestation problem? thanks


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## cmk (Aug 29, 2014)

Nope! Mites are a part of dart froging. In a fresh culture there should be no mites. After 3 or 4 weeks, theyre just gonna come in. Use the search up top of the page, it helpped me sooooo much when i started! I still use it a lot! Good luck!


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## greenthumbs (Nov 6, 2015)

You can keep your cultures in a tub of water (putting soap in the water helps but isn't necessary) to keep mites from getting in them. When you start a new culture, you can dust the flies you put into the new culture, which will decrease the chance of mites hitching a ride on the flies. You can also buy mite spray or mite paper to guard your cultures from mites. I never got mites in my cultures for months, and then I bought one culture from Petco that had mites in it and all my cultures were infested within days. Buying mite-free cultures is a good preventative measure.


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## ACEFROG (Jan 1, 2016)

ok great! thank you so much, very excited about this new hobby!


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## jprosser (Jan 9, 2015)

There will be mites everywhere in your house anyway! You just need to try and keep them away from the cultures.
They just thrive on the media in cultures so once in the culture, they outcompete fly's and become a pest.
I pretty much guarantee that no one has cultures with no mites in, that's why new cultures have to be made so often. They just need to be controlled.
I use mite paper.

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk


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## ACEFROG (Jan 1, 2016)

i got 2 cultures started on 12/17 from a local store. this may sound dumb but if i prepare the food source and add the media on top like they have, do i just put existing flies i have into the new container and they start to multiply? thus starting a new culture?


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## Mavpa (Jan 5, 2015)

ACEFROG said:


> i got 2 cultures started on 12/17 from a local store. this may sound dumb but if i prepare the food source and add the media on top like they have, do i just put existing flies i have into the new container and they start to multiply? thus starting a new culture?


Well, the media IS the food source. You make that according to whatever instructions are in the package and put whatever you're throwing in there to give the flies somewhere to walk around on top, usually it's excellsior in the store bought ones, but a lot of people use coffee filters. Give it some time to cool and to de-gas... then dump a good number of flies in. I always say 100, but I honestly have to idea how many it is, I just know what it looks like to me.

One word of advise regarding mites and store bought cultures... they're usually a little worse with the mites than what you'll find from a lot of places. The sooner you start a new culture or two from the ones you have, the less mites you have. If you wait too long, you'll transport so many mites it'll crash the culture before you get any production.


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## ACEFROG (Jan 1, 2016)

ok i can do that. thank you


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

There is a lot of advice about mites that really doesn't prevent their presence or how they affect the cultures. The most common mite in the cultures is one of the grain mites and these are very difficult to exclude as they are common households and are pretty much present in any grain or flour based foods. Unlike the predatory mites that show up from time to time these mites don't tend to develop into large populations until the culture is older and drier. As the fly population declines the mite population increases so there can be a perception that the mites are causing the culture to crash but instead the crash could be due to other factors such as age of the media and genetics of the flies. 

As an example the suggestion to use water as a barrier really isn't that effective as the size of the mite means it won't break the surface tension of the water. As a consequence they can actually travel from one container to the next. 

The best thing to use is simply mite paper under the cultures, don't stack the cultures, try to have them not touching each other and either move cultures over 30 days from the new cultures or discard them at that point. 

Dusting the flies with a fine supplement or calcium powder and then only using the flies on the top of the collected flies can help reduce the presence as well. In reality the best thing to expect is to manage their numbers and not to expect them to be eliminated. 

Some comments 

Ed


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