As soon as my husband and I get our own place I'm going to seriously up my mouse production. So I need to figure out exactly how many breeding females I need and roughly estimate how much it will cost me per month. So here is an example of my set up (please note that the mice will be moved to a tub in the future and all future groups will be in tubs. The tank is a temporary cage.)

1.3 in a 10g tank
8oz water bottle
Mazuri 6F
Wood Pellet bedding, topped with Aspen


Now, if I plan on using mice as my main source of food, I will need quite a few mice. Three of my ball pythons are on small rats (130g+) and the rest are on full grown mice (this is mostly the males and one female). So lets say that 9 of my snakes are on mice, 6 of those are taking 2 mice per meal. For just the snakes, that is 15 mice. I also will need roughly 50 mice per week as feeders for other animals. So weekly, I will be putting away 65 mice easily. How many females do you estimate I will need. The mice will be in 1.3-1.5 groups.

Now as far as food goes. I feed them Mazuri 6f. I can get a 50lb bag for about $55 online. (no one around here sells it). I also feed the rodents kitchen scraps. These kitchen scraps are made up of raw veggies, fruits, dry pastas and grains (oatmeal) and on the very very rare occasion, cooked meat.

So I was wondering how much of the block food will a 1.3 group go through per day? I want to start portioning out food so that the mice don't overfeed or get underfed. (Kind of like the back of a bag of dog kibble gives out recommended amounts to feed your dog) I know that if you put food into the cage, the mice will eat what they want. But I'm trying to get everything as organized as possible so it makes it easier to care for a large number of rodents and I don't want to be wasteful either.