FlyNap® Anesthetic Kit

When I received the product I found it was not the dark brown color it usually is. I am not sure if the solution changes color with time or if the chemical used is different from flynap I have purchased before. Students did not seem to find the product to be ineffective.

Couldnt imagine completing the fruit fly expirements without this great product. It really was neat to anesthetize the tiny flies - great way to take a close look. My 7th grader used this for the fruit fly linked genes kit and was fascinated and very successful.

I used Flynap recently on a fruit fly lab in my AP Bio class. The first thing I want to mention is that this stuff smells VERY strong. After several different classes using it throughout the day, you could smell the Flynap from outside the hall, only getting stronger as you approached the classroom. I cant say its an unpleasant smell; a few of us said it smelled like "old soap youd get at your grandmas", but regardless, not super great. The product itself works, to an extent. The first time we used it, the flies knocked out within 3 minutes and we could go about the lab. They would twitch a little here and there, but for the most part, they were asleep for the duration of the period (about 50 minutes). We left them to breed for 2 weeks, then anesthetized them again to scoop out the parent flies. The Flynap worked for like 40 minutes, then most of the flies started to wake up. Not a big deal, because we didnt need to work with them for very long, but still not quite the 50 minutes promised. The last time we worked with them, we anesthetized the flies to count the different crosses that developed. The Flynap put the flies to sleep for a total of like 25-30 minutes. As we tried to pour the flies out from the culture vials onto index cards so we could look at them under the microscopes, they werent even asleep and began crawling around the index card almost immediately. A few even flew away. The last half of class was just a frenzy of panicked screaming and the slaps of flies being smushed to prevent them from flying off as we struggled to conduct the lab. Definitely not the 50 minutes promised. Maybe we didnt use enough Flynap or something, but all in all, the product works. You just gotta work fast. :P