Fresh Flightless Fruit Fly Culture 4 Inch Vial Drosophila Melanogaster

Description

Buyer read description, via purchase shipping/handling terms are accepted.
Product Description
Fresh Fruit Fly Culture, ideal food for Dart Frogs, Fish, Jumping Spiders, Young Frogs and Toads, Praying Mantids, and other small reptiles/amphibians.
Your Culture is made with Spirulina powder and other anti mold ingredients containing good vitamins, minerals, and ample nutrients for optimal growth/reproduction.
How to feed flies
Tap top of container, fruit flies will fall to the bottom. Then remove the lid, and shake the flies into the desired location.
How to feed Larva
A great emergency feeder and high in fat, larva can easily be scooped out of the media or off the sides with a spoon or tweezers.
Lifespan
The fruit flies can live up to two weeks, if maintained properly your culture can produce for weeks up to months. Keep in mind that the fly lifespan is so short, not all flies make it through shipping.
How to store/Temperature
You MUST keep your culture warm in order to produce to its full potential.
Keep
70-80 degrees
for BEST results.
If kept too cold culture will struggle to produce, if kept too warm offspring can mutate and regain the ability to fly.
Overcrowding may cause culture to perish, empty as needed.
Average house temperature during the winter is substantially less across the United States. Lower temperatures will not necessarily result in less fruit flies produced per culture, but can greatly increase the length of time it takes a culture to produce flies. Accompanying the delay in fly production is an increased threat of grain mites – these pests are capable of reproducing in a much wider range of conditions than fruit flies are.
Grain mites are present in all fruit fly cultures, and in most situations are not harmful, but if given the proper conditions, they are capable of overrunning a fruit fly culture, and eventually crashing it.
Typically, if the temperature is increased to a level more favorable for fruit flies, they will resume production, and the mites themselves will be out-competed.
There are several ways to ensure that fruit flies receive the required temperatures during the winter (ideally as close to 78F as possible). The easiest method is to keep the fruit flies near a heat source, such as a water heater or lights used to light the animal enclosures. When trying this, remember that heat rises, and often cultures located nearer the ceiling of a room will be several degrees warmer than ones located near the floor. Alternatively, creating an incubator of sorts for the cultures can keep them warm. Anything from reptile egg incubators to a plastic container with a heat source, such as a basking bulb or heat pad, can be effective.
Humidity
The cold winter weather generally leads to the furnace running most of the time. This not only increases the household temperature, but also substantially decreases the relative humidity. Ideally, fruit fly cultures are maintained at 60-80% humidity, and lower humidity can result in the culture media drying out, allowing a ‘skin’ to form over the surface of the media (just like pudding can form a ‘skin’ if left in the fridge). This ‘skin’ will suffocate the larvae, or cause them to climb up the sides of the culture in search of oxygen. Spraying the culture with a bit of water will correct this issue.
By looking at the placement of pupae on the side of a culture, you can infer if the culture is receiving the proper humidity or not. Under ideal conditions, the pupae will be spread evenly throughout the sides of the culture, with most of them located at mid level. If most of the pupae are located at the top of the culture, the humidity is too high. If the pupae seem concentrated lower in the culture, towards the media, the humidity is too low. Keeping cultures in plastic storage drawers, such as those made by Sterilite, is a quick and easy way to ensure that proper humidity is maintained.
Shipping
Mon-Tues Only
The reduced temperatures winter brings makes shipping live animals even more difficult than it already is, and shipping fruit flies is no exception. Insulated boxes with heat packs are used when the temperature drops, but even so, the interior temperature of a package can vary widely in transit, depending on how it is handled by the carrier, and the length of it’s travels.
Packed with insulation and a heat pack, a fruit fly culture will maintain interior temperatures approximately 10 degrees above that of its surroundings. Adding a heat pack will raise the temperatures another 10 degrees. Even at 20 degrees above ambient temperature, the cultures will experience a wide range of temperatures in transit, due to the change in the daytime highs and overnight lows the part of the country the package passes through experiences. This constant temperature shift certainly does not have a positive effect on the fruit fly cultures – at best, it has a neutral effect, and often negatively impacts the culture. It’s very easy for cold weather to slow down or stop the natural progression of a fruit fly culture during shipping. Often, it delays peak production by several days – that is why producing cultures sometimes take a few days to catch up after shipping in winter. If the fruit fly culture is exposed to very cold temperatures, flies, pupae, and/or larvae may perish. Once situated in a proper environment the culture will rebound, but sometimes chilly weather may cause the culture to fail, and/or allow grain mites to exponentially reproduce in the culture, leading it to perish.
No live arrival guarantee in temperatures below 0° or temperatures higher than 85°  No guarantee that culture will produce after being in temps below 0° or higher than 85°. I pay for First Class or Priority shipping depending on the amount of flies ordered, if it takes longer than expected, I am not at fault. No refund if USPS loses, mishandles, or delays package delivery, as the seller/shipper has no control of packages once the post office has possession. Your package MUST be delivered/left with an individual, retrieved immediately,  OR request a post office hold by simply going to the USPS website. If you aren’t home to receive/retrieve your flies IMMEDIATELY, and you did not request a post office hold, this will most likely result in a dead culture. Buyer beware! Track your package! I am able to see when, where, and what temps your flies were delivered in. There is a tracking number provider for buyer and seller to view.
Leaving your order outside/in the Mail box may result in dead flies.
The only way a refund will be issued is if flies were DOA in 0-85° weather, in the unlikely event this happens, send photo proof within 1 hour of delivery, a replacement or a refund will happily be sent. MUST SEND PHOTO PROOF OF PERISHED CULTURE WITHIN 1 HOUR OF DELIVERY TO RECEIVE REPLACEMENT OR REFUND otherwise I understandably cannot assume responsibility of perished culture anytime after 1 hour of delivery.