Starting Out - Questions About Quantity

[snakecharmer3638]

There lies the mystery! Lol. I adopted him from a woman who is breeding BPs and had two males of the same het. Not needing two for breeding, I was able to take one. She told me that he eats 2 live mice but failed to tell me what size (and in my excitement, I didn't ask). He's about 16 inches right now but he does look a little skinny so that's why I'm a bit puzzled. I shot her an e-mail asking what size she was feeding him and now I'm just waiting for her to get back to me. If she gets back to me soon I'm going to head out to Petco and pick up what he eats and then maybe next week I'll begin my mouse colony. I want to get a feel for his eating habits before I start my little rodent family.

Do your snakes eat one or two adult mice?

I quess this can be looked at several ways. When I say "adult mice", I mean large mice. But some people could consider a small mouse that had just been weaned an adult mouse. I feed my girls one large mouse every five days. Also to consider is sometimes it can take months for a breeding colony to get started. And by that time your snake may require an even larger meal. I had my breeders together for over a month before I got any babies. And then after the babies are born your looking at twenty two more days until they can be weaned. And maybe another month to fatten them up. So there is a little time in just getting started.
So as others have stated you might want to consider just buying your feeders as needed. It would probably be cheaper for me if I did, but I don't live close enough to a place where I can get feeders. So I kind of started breeding again just because I was getting several mice at once, probably thirty every time I went to the pet store. So since I was already housing mice and spending money on food and bedding, and plus I like breeding mice and will probably start breeding rats when I get more room, I just decided to go ahead and set up a few colonies.
So I quess what I'm trying to say with all my rambling is.... Some people breed out of necessity and others do it just because they like the experience of it all.