Fresh Drosophila Melanogaster Fruit Fly Culture

I feel like this store gets bad reviews for things completely out of their control… mail deliveries are inconsistent at best… especially Amazon packages these days… also they have no control over how you care for your kits. I bought my first one over a year ago, it is officially dying now, because I failed to care for it recently. When this comes the first thing you should be doing is preparing a new cup with food to start your own culture as it takes weeks to start. chances are that you will have big blooms of over population followed by huge losses because unless you are a big time spider owner, you will not use them as fast as they hatch. Over population will kill them faster than lack of food. Great quality culture, I tried a pet store cup to boost mine back up and they did not take well at all, Josh’s are way better. I paid 7 dollars for a 8 oz culture at the pet store, immediately set them up to create a new 32 oz culture cup, it worked to a degree, I got a few but not enough to feed my one full grown jumper and my new sling a proper diet with enough to start a new culture, they didn’t even make a dent in the food there were so few. With Josh’s I start a culture with about 20 flies for a slow controlled start and still end up with more than I need which I feed to my guppies each week.

They arrived alive with a decent number of flies inside. I got them for my juvenile jumping spider, Abba, and he loves them!

the only downside was the container was sorta smooshed. all the bugs were still inside but it was not nice to unsmoosh. not really y’all’s fault but the delivery people. my froggys LOVE these little guys.

I paid for a booming culture. I got a slopfest of a culture with two live flies and the cup coated with fly media from top to bottom. They put on one "this side up" sticker. An absolute waste of time and money. I would have had to drive 45 minutes to get to my nearest herp store, but I would have been better off. These guys suck at every level. If they can't get fruit flies right, why would you trust them with anything else?

Get these!!! I have two L2 ghost mantises that can’t eat anything larger than these! I had bought 2 separate colonies of flies from other sellers and they died within a couple days but these are doing incredibly even a week and a half later! They even held up through the mail in the hot florida heat! Josh’s frogs always lives up to the hype. I will definitely be buying again! I also got pinhead crickets (because one of my mantises is VERY picky (and slow)) and they love them too! Neither smell particularly good but they’re bugs so… The flies and crickets are great quality and the price point is great for what you’re getting!

I’ve ordered fruit flies from this company for various insects and spiders I’ve kept over the years, and they’ve always been great. Healthy colonies, not too expensive and great customer service

Wow! Amazed with this seller. Product arrived SUPER fast and I can’t get over how many fruit flies there are. They just keep multiplying. My daughter’s jumping spider is happily fed and I’m relieved that I don’t have to make weekly trips for crickets that her spider didn’t seem to like. He loves these though. Thank you Josh!

This wingless fruit fly culture came with many fruit flies in eggs about to hatch, and once they hatched it was crawling with them. We used this to feed praying mantises that we hatched from egg sacs (also from Josh's Frogs). The flies can't fly but they crawl very fast and can jump pretty high (adaptation due to lack of wings I would guess). The easiest way I found to take out just a few of them for feeding the praying mantises was to lay the container on its side in the fridge for about 30 minutes or an hour to chill it down. (Make sure you lay it on its side, otherwise they can get stuck in their food when they become stationary.) At the same time, I put a small plate in the freezer. The flies will slow down to the point where you can just shake out a few onto the chilled plate. They will stay still long enough for handling. You can use a paint brush to push a few into the jar with the praying mantises and after a short time (usually seconds) they warm up and start walking around. You can also try using your fingers if you're gentle but you need to be quick because it will warm them up pretty quickly and then they'll start jumping away. The first batch of flies produced more eggs and I believe those flies produced another batch of eggs, so I think we got three generations of flies from this culture.