The Hydei starter kit includes a cup of freshly hatched hydei flies, and the materials to make ten cultures.  Note that it does not ship with an established culture, our experience in the past has shown that cultures of hydei do not ship well.  Instead when our flies hatch here, we pack up a good portion in a cup with some excelsior and a little media to keep them happy, and send them out. Please select at least Two Day shipment for live arrival guarantee, read the information in red at the main category heading for more.  Read on for more information on hydei!

Hydei flies are a larger fly which are suitable for all larger species of dart frogs, such as auratus, tinctorius, etc.  While babies and juveniles may be find the flies too large for them,  once the frogs are over four to six months of age, they will be able to eat this fly.  They have a very different life cycle than the melanogaster, in that the cultures tend to take about three weeks to produce, and when they do begin producing, all the flies hatch over a brief period, maybe two to four days.  The production is considerable! In fact these cultures produce so many flies that unless you are careful and remove the flies within 24 hours or so, they can crash, killing all the flies in the cup.

These are an excellent choice for you if you have several frogs or more, as a single culture can feed about fifteen frogs, probably twice over four or five days.  However after this, the culture won’t usually produce more flies, so you will have to have other food sources, or carefully stagger your production so that hatches occur every few days. We are culturing two different types of hydei, regular and “golden”.  I personally don’t find that there is much difference in these, and I’ll ship your order with my choice, unless you request one or the other.

Hydei are notorious for having mites. These mites don’t seem to affect the cultures production, they seem to do just fine.  However the mites in your hydei culture can easily infest other types of flies or springtails, so be careful.

For information on culturing fruit flies, click here!