Purchasing live flies / etc.?

topic posted Mon, June 28, 2004 - 2:33 PM by  C. A. Church
Anyone have any good resources on the web for purchasing live flies or other food stuffs for my little plants? Don't have a lot of them right now, just the usual flytrap and a bladderwort, (adding in a sundew this weekend, and currently building a much larger terrarium to hold pitcher plants) - but I keep them indoors in terrariums, and well, while going out and catching bugs can be interesting excersize (and boy, are there a lot around me) - I find that many of the bugs I can draw up from under rocks aren't particularly attracted to the flytraps, amongst other things (too big / too small, etc.). The bladderworts seem easy enough to feed, being so small, I just take some dirt from the potted plants outside - infested with fungus gnats - it's the bigger guys I'm concerned with.

Basically, I'm wondering if anyone knows of a place that one can order live flies (typical 'house' and 'fruit' kinds) online, so that I don't have to infest my house with them to get food in for the plants? (my terrariums all have fine mesh covers anyhow, so they wouldn't even make it in there... Mostly - I want to keep 'em from getting out =)

!c
posted by:
C. A. Church
Houston
  • Re: Purchasing live flies / etc.?

    Sat, January 15, 2005 - 11:03 AM
    a bay area resource is the vivarium in berkeley--they have a fruit fly kit(?) which is a good sized plastic container with some kind of agar-like foodstuffs at the bottom and filled with larvae and adult fruit flies. you could open this up in your terrarium, and let your plants do their work. watch how much they eat though--my pitcher plants seem to get overfull.

    it is an awful lot of fruit flies though. a theory is that refridgerating the live ones will slow growth without killing them.

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