Starting to breed...opinions please

Ok so I have kept snakes and a few lizards(beardeds, iguanas, monitors etc.) for about 15 years but have never bred. I recently met an amazing woman who is just as passionate about reptiles as I am and we both love BPs so we've decided to start breeding. Here's our plan. We are going to rotate a male spider into four females. A normal female to produce spiders, a pastel to produce spiders, pastels and hopefully a bumblebee or two. And two other unknown morph females, possibly pastels (love those bees lol.) any suggestions??? Also, what back up male would you suggest?

Our next plan is to pair an Albino male with several 100% het albinos backed up by a het albino male to produce some albinos and more hets.

Third, my girlfriend is in love with the super cinnamons so we are planning to pick up a pair of those in the hope of a super.

And lastly, we would like to get some het pieds (2.4 ideally if budget allows) and pair them up in the hope of pieds.

We know this seems big for just starting out but we have a couple growing years to pay for all of em as I'm buying juvis. And there's just so darn many we want lol:)

Any opinions or tips would be great guys thanks in advance!!!

I will let others chime in about the whole project, but after shopping around for a pied, I realized that for the price the het pied females go for, you would be better to get a pied female right away than some hets. I've seen some low white ones go for a really good price. And the amount of white on the dam doesn't affect the potential amount of white on the babies. I've seen low white produce some really high whites, and vice versa.

You can pick up a het male for really cheap and be garanteed to make some pieds on your first clutch, then you can hold some back and start making pieds everytime :)

That's what I would personnaly do.

I have seen het pieds females go for $300-400, and some pieds go for $900.

Well we had considered actually going with a pied male I have seen some pied male (low white of course) going for 650.00 so I may go that route

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Originally Posted by ScottNBecky

Well we had considered actually going with a pied male I have seen some pied male (low white of course) going for 650.00 so I may go that route

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This is how I started this year. I picked up an awesome medium white pied male, and a beautiful het. pied male for under 800. I can't wait till I can breed them. I chose the pied male over a pied female because I have a few other projects that I would like to use him for. Best of luck in your future breeding plans.:gj:

Either way sounds good. With a male you can definitely involve him in more than one project :gj:

Get the hardware before the animals. Your looking at a serious investment, don't want it to die due to not having the equipment you need. Looking at your list you want about 20 ball pythons already. You need a rack for them that will cover them as adults and the babies. (Use the baby rack and move your purchases up as they out grow the baby tubs.), a good quality thermostat or two, an incubator, all the water dishes, all the hides...

Get the room set up for them before the first one shows up and make sure you leave room for expansion. Instead of getting all these animals in at once and having to QT them in every room in the house, look at making group purchases. Start your records before they get there and get all the records you can when you buy them. (Not all breeders I have purchased from keep records like we do, but it makes me feel a lot better when I get records compared to when I don't.)

Also figure out your feeding supply. Grow your own or buy them, FT or live... If your doing live it is a lot cheaper to raise your own rats than purchase them every week!

Also look at registering as an LLC or something before you start buying everything, that way you can use most purchases as a tax deduction.

Also if you need help let me know! You are not all that close, but close enough that a round trip can be made in a day.

Well we have a few of the animals now and we are adding one a month roughly. We currently have them housed in a display cage made to hold 8 but we are going to begin building a breeding rack in a couple weeks and a hatchling rack as well. The plan is to have a Herpstat ND on the breeding rack and a cheaper thermostat on the hatchling rack. Also, once those are done Were going to pick up a pop cooler if we can find one or an old fridge if not and run a Herpstat on it as well for an incubator. Were adding the animals slowly to help offset the cost of both the animals and the keeping as well as making quarantining easier. As far as feeders we are currently breeding rats and ASFs and are slowly increasing their numbers to help offset the cost. Also, Were tryin to switch everything over to F/T so we can minimize the space we need for live feeders.

As far as record keeping goes we couldn't agree more. We try to track growth rate weekly, and track meal size, type, and whether it was live or F/T.

We would be interested in more information on registering as an LLC. Were familiar with what it is but have no idea how to go about getting it. Any info you could offer on that would great. Feel free to email us if you feel it's too long for the boards. Ncmedic964@yahoo.com.

Thanks for the advice and the offered support we may take you up on it.