right...i have recently put up a care sheet on caring for your fruit fly cultures and starting new ones an have had allot of pm's an emails about my 0 tolerance with mites so i thought i start a thread and poll for people to give there views and thoughts on fruit flies mites


my views

mites are bad full stop some compete for food and some directly attack the flies them selfs but all in all they are bad news

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I use mite paper under my cultures and start new cultures regularly as mites are generally more of a problem in older cultures.

There seem to be 2 main types of mite associated with ff's, small brown ones that don't seem to have any adverse effect on the production and larger whitish ones that seem to stop production.

If i have the white ones I will usually bin the cultures and start with fresh.

The smaller brown ones can usually be practically eradicated by the use of mite paper and regular renewal of cultures.

Using kitchen roll instead of mesh on top of the cultures also helps with this as the mites cannot get through it and infest other cultures.

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