Live food - Houseflies flightless - vers. Sizes

Live food - Houseflies flightless - vers. Sizes

Flightless houseflies (Musa domestica) are a great live food for frogs and toads in terrariums and aquaterrariums. You can also feed the 6 to 9 mm flies to omnivorous or carnivorous crabs and to approach food eating fish that pick insects off the water surface. Super also for wild bird rearing!

In terms of size, houseflies are comparable to our European houseflies. Here you are buying specimens with not fully formed wings, which have been purposefully bred as live food.

These houseflies can not fly well, they hop only a few centimeters and can therefore be caught well by the frogs and co. in the terrarium. This also makes it very easy to remove them from the breeding set, you don't have to be very careful to make sure none of the flies escape.

The genes for the flightlessness of houseflies are inherited recessively, therefore the offspring of flightless houseflies with flightless houseflies are predominantly flightless. So take good care not to let any flightless fly sneak in, and if necessary, sort out the flighty ones before breeding on.

Place your breeding stock of flightless houseflies in a Faunabox, putting 100 to 500 flies in it, depending on size. Ideal temperature for breeding is 25 °C. Add a bird feeder to your breeding container for water supply. Feed the flies with a mixture of milk porridge (pure or with fruit, from Alete, Humana etc.), cod liver oil, honey and multivitamin juice. Attention, the mixture must not stick!As egg-laying place you put a small bowl filled with moist wheat bran in the breeding container. Mix a walnut-sized piece of curd with the bran. This is where the flies like to lay their eggs.

Put the contents of the egg-laying container and the food container (where the flies also lay eggs) into a 5-gallon bucket lined with household towels, the maggot container, and add a small amount of cottage cheese. Cover the bucket fly-tight with a piece of fly gauze to prevent houseflies from outside from laying their eggs in your maggot rearing bin. The maggots must not get warmer than 26°C. If you want to feed fly maggots, you should wash them thoroughly in a fine sieve before feeding.

Feed the fly maggots daily with curd and they will pupate after 8-10 days. Fill the maggot container with cold water. The fly pupae will float up and can be skimmed off with a sieve. Put the pupae back into the adult housefly container, where the young flightless houseflies will hatch after about 5-8 days.

Here you buy flightless houseflies as breeding stock.

Suitable for: omnivorous and carnivorous crabs, larger aquarium fish that eat insects from the surface, for amphibians, for breeding wild birds

Available sizes:
Small - 1/2 liter