Size of breeding colony

[fade2black]

I am going to be getting a pair of BP from Mark Kennedy soon. I have been lurking on here for a little while reading up on breeding my own food, but I couldn't find anything on recommended colony sizes. The pair I am looking at is about 3 months old and feeding on medium mice right now. Can I start breeding rats now and maybe change them over to to small rats? Also, about what size colony will I need to support my pair?

Thanks!

[fade2black]

Anyone? No one has any input on this at all? Well, I'm starting off with 1:2 rats and 1:3 mice and see how that goes.

[the_mechanic]

If you don't have more than 2 snakes, I doubt it would be cost efficient to breed rats, not to mention all the work and cleaning..

[Schlyne]

Apprently I missed this thread when it was first posted.

I think I'd start off with either the mice or the rats. Espeically with the rats, I would wait until you are sure that both bp's will take rats. Sometimes a bp will not take rats and will only take mice.

I'm assumiing you want to breed the balls as well? If you don't have more than a couple of snakes I really don't think it woudl be worth the time and effort to feed, clean and take care of the mice or rats (unless you have a good local place that you can sell feeders to, and will let you sell feeders to them).

[fade2black]

Thanks for the input! I'm not too worried about being cost effective because my son wants to breed them for fun as well as to feed the pair of BP and the 2 kingsnakes we have now (and yes, we will be breeding the BP next year probably). We have a couple of local pet stores that would take the extra offspring too. I just didn't want to start off with too few...although I could just go get more huh?

[Schlyne]

Yeah, you can always get more later.

[Jase]

I'm not sure about the cost effectiveness
but the way we've done our feeder breeding has worked out well
we have our mice colonies set up as: 1.5 mice (we have 4 of these)
and the rats are: 1.4 rats (we have 2 of these)
but we use rather large enclosures compared to
we've got 4 of the mice colonies going without a hitch
our rats breed, but it seems to be on their terms, not on ours, they just dont breed as efficiently as our mice do

[Ginevive]

Here's the stats on my little rat/mouse breeding operation:

Amount of rats: 1.3, maybe 1.4 if I keep the midsize female I just got and do not feed her to Gob
Amount of mice: one female and her 7 unsexed weanlings
Cost spent weekly on bedding: 1.00
Cost of food per week: $4.00 a bag
Time spent cleaning tanks: half hour/week, if that
So that's $5 a week. I would spend that one one rat alone for Goblin per week!

Right now, I have 1.3 rats. One of these is pregnant, and in the freezer, I have five baby rats from the other two females' last litters. I rotate the male between the nonpreggo females every night and hopefully soon someone will take. I weigh them and when they are a bit heavier, and gain more weight in a few days, I kno that the pregnancy took.

I have one mama mouse with her 7 babies which are newly weaned. I am going to grow them up in a few weeks and either feed them to my smaller BPs who will take mice or rats, OR trade them to my local petstore for more rat feed. Then I just buy a male "sperm donor" mouse, breed the female with him and feed him off!

[fade2black]

Thanks for the info Gin. I picked up a couple of mouse and rat bins this weekend and will be setting everything up this week.

[Ginevive]

Cool, it is pretty rewarding when you have baby mice/rats running around and think "wow, free snake-food!"