Cabbage fly
The cabbage fly is a small grey fly that looks a lot like a house fly. Gardeners know it well, because its babies grow up eating the roots of cabbages. It spends the winter asleep in the ground.
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Fun facts
Its eggs are white and only about 1 millimetre across, like a tiny grain of salt.
The eggs hatch after about six days, and the maggots eat roots for about three weeks.
Sometimes 300 maggots live on one single plant.
A plant with maggots grows slowly, and its leaves wilt and turn a little bit blue.
In northern Europe it has one family a year, but in warmer central Europe it can have two or three.
Most asked questions about Cabbage fly
?Is the cabbage fly harmful?
Not to people, but its maggots can kill cabbage, turnip and radish plants by eating their roots.
?What does a cabbage fly look like?
It is a grey fly about 1 centimetre long that looks like a house fly.
?What does the cabbage fly eat?
The adult drinks nectar. The maggots eat the roots of cabbage family plants.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Delia radicum
- Group
- Flies and mosquitoes
- Family
- Anthomyiidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Diptera > Anthomyiidae
- Lives on
- Europe
- Also known as
- Cabbage root fly, Root fly, Turnip fly
Where the facts come from
- Delia radicum (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by James K. Lindsey. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at hello@bugwiki.app and we will fix it.
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