Drosophila Specimens

Live Fruit Flies (Drosophila)

The Widest Selection of Drosophila for Every Application, All in One Place

Whether you're feeding your classroom pets or studying sex-linked, recessive, and dominant trait mutations and life cycles with your students, Drosophila are widely applicable for a variety of classroom applications. Ward's Science carries the widest selection of Drosophila to meet your needs.

About Drosophila: Drosophila, or fruit flies, express a number of mutations such as eye, wing, and body mutations, and are widely used in genetic studies. Drosophila demonstrate complete metamorphosis with egg. larva, pupa, and adult stages in its life cycle. Drosophila also make an excellent live food for mantises, small reptiles and amphibians.

Shipping and Care Information:

  • Cultures are shipped in with drosophila medium in a shatterproof vial.
  • The pupae will usually appear within ten days of the ship date.
  • During very cold weather, adult flies may die but eggs and larvae usually survive. Allow cultures to come to room temperature before checking under low magnification and live larvae.

For easy caring and handling of your Drosophila, use our Drosophila Cluture Guides

Working With Drosophila

Drosophila Live Care and Handling Guide

Type  Description 
Wild Type Flies  Wild type flies, including males and virgin females 
Chromosome I Mutants  Apricot (a), Bar (B), Forked (f), Miniature (m), Ruby (rb), Vermilion (v), White (w), Yellow (y) and more. 
Chromosome II Mutants  Apterous (ap), Black (b), Brown (bw), Dumpy (dp), Lobe (L), Vestigial (vg) and more 
Chromosome III Mutants  Antennapedia (Antp), Ebony (e), Scarlet (st), Sepia (se), and Sepia-Ebony (se:e) 
Chromosome IV Mutants  Eyeless (ey) and Polished (pol) 
Multichromosomal Mutants  Contains mutants with multiple chromosome mutations 
F1 Crosses  F1 crossed as well as custom fly crosses available 
Standard Crosses Three day lead time required on standard crosses 
Fruit Fly Sets Sets come with cultures so crossing can be performed by students in the classroom 
Other Fruit Flies  Flightless fruit flies, Drosophila virilis, and Drosophila mojavensis. 10 day lead time required for virilis larvae