The following is the method we use for making and maintaining our wingless fruit fly cultures. These flies are great food for poison dart frogs, small tree frogs, and certain fish. There are definitely multiple methods to keeping fruit flies, and this is only one of them - since this is working well for us, I am going to only post this one for now. As we refine and develop any better techniques, we'll post them for everyone.

The first thing you will need for your culture is a starter culture - these you can purchase at the store.

Next, you will need to make up a batch of culture medium. The recipe for this medium is:
- 4 parts potato flakes
- 1 parts sugar
- 1/8th parts activated yeast (I tend to stay on the lighter side of this)

I give the recipe in parts so you can adjust is to your needs, but if you want actual sizes, I make batches of medium in the following quantities:
- 16 cups potato flakes
- 4 cups sugar
- 1/2 cup activated yeast

When mixing medium, I recommend keeping an eye on your sugar. I've always found that sugar likes to clump, and you need to break up these clumps to avoid having large pockets of pure sugar in your medium. I don't know what this would do in a culture, but I would assume it would not be ideal.

Once you have your medium, mix 1/3 cup of medium with 1/2 cup of water in your fly culture container. We use 32 ounce plastic containers. After the medium solidifies a little, sprinkle a bit more activated yeast on top (which is why I recommend to stay on the light side of the yeast amount above). Then crumble up a paper towel and I like to lightly press it into the medium, but many people like to simply toss it on top.

Now that the culture is ready, all you need to do is add flies from your original starter culture. Simply shake a couple hundred flies from your current culture into the new culture. Don't skimp on the flies in this step as too few flies will make the culture take longer to start producing useful numbers.

A new culture usually takes about a week or two to start producing enough flies to be used for feeding, so keep that in mind and make new cultures as necessary for your animals.

Remember that we usually have available cultures for sale at the store, and we should have medium and containers available for sale as well if you want to make your own cultures, but want a little bit of the extra work taken out of the equation.

- Bill