New blood to an old colony

I have had my established colony for two years now. I have the males and females seperated to stop production as I am overstocked on them.
Last year I purchased a trio from a new place and put them in with my colony. I watched them for over an hour from afar to see how they would do. It seemed ok...but I was wrong...dead wrong.
All three were murdered and partially eaten. I felt bad about that and haven't tried again since. So, my question is, is there any way to add fresh genetics to my colony without starting a new colony?

The only way I'd try it is to buy a new breeding group young, raise them up, breed them and then put their young with young from your established bloodline (at the weanling stage). They should accept each other that way and create new breeding groups where the male is unrelated to the females.

I have switched out babies and I have also added males in with some adult females at cleaning time...sometimes they make it sometimes they don't but most will get the job done to add the new blood.

If I have a choice I will just switch babies at this point, they don't seem to care to much about babies.

Ok, so everybody from your old colony is older? I would recomend that you use virgin (if possible) males from your old colony and get new blood females. Make sure the new blood females you get are as big as possible but definately virgins.

Put them in a freshly cleaned tub / tank. Throw a wheel, some toilet paper rolls, some wood to chew....

Set them up in groups of no more then 1.1 or 1.2. You may have some fighting, but it is not likely under these circumstances that they will fight to the death. Set larger breeding groups up with the babies produced from this pairing.

Let us know how it goes!

Maybe i misread your origional post. You said that your males and females from the old colony have been seperated for a while??? How long have they been seperated?

If you are afraid to introduce the old colony males to the old colony females again, and want to add new blood in the mix, then follow my advice.

If you are able to start your old colony breeding again, then follow fraknyvenos advice....

Am I making sense here??? Maybe I should go back to bed!!!

I understood what you wrote but I don't know if that accounts for anything :gj:

No, I don't have a problem with reintroducing the males to the females when I breed. They must remember each others scent? But adding new rats old enough to have fur and the colony kills them. I think what I am going to do (not for a long time because as of now my snake is on and off his feedings and I have too many rats now) is set up another tub (hopefully my husband is ok with that as he thinks I am full on the animal quota) and have the new trio stay together, then time the pregnancies and give the new rats litters to the colony. That sounds the most logical. And maybe to appease my husband, I could feed off the new trio after a couple of litters so I dont too many tubs.

I don't know. Right now I don't have room for another tub and I have too many rats so this is a future project and maybe I will keep the new tub. It's up in the air right now but thanks for the advise and when I do, I will let you know what happens.