BP Food Quantity/Frequency Question

[Bananii]

Hey everyone!

Okay, so a while back I bought my first BP, a female 66% pos het pied Pewter gal with pretty coloring. Since November she has gone from 175 g ish to now 500 g as of yesterday, empty. About a month ago I moved up to feeding her two mice, and just today I tried three. She's one of those "watch out for your fingers" BP's that will eat basically anything, f/t or live, and she has yet to refuse a meal. Now, where I'm at there's no access to rats at different ages, so my choices are basically mice and adult rats. I really am not looking to powerfeed this gal as I plan to have her for a while, and I'm just hoping to get some advice on the amount of food that is appropriate for her size. Does anyone have a rule of thumb about percentage of her weight I should be feeding her, how many mice before I can feed her a smallish rat, how many mice to feed her period, etc?

Thank you!

[Daybreaker]

They can be on rats from day 1, so she should be able to take at least a small rat just fine. I use the 10-15% rule when feeding younger ones, so she could take a feeder that's roughly 50-75 grams, have that be one rat or how ever many mice. If you can only find large rats in your area I would recommend looking into buying f/t in bulk, especially if your girl will eat f/t and rats readily. If you're in the US I recommend Layne Labs and Rodent Pro: both have great prices and a very good selection. RP is more for large orders while LL does better for smaller orders IMO (since their shipping rates are cheaper).

[PghBall]

I would definitely recommend rats over mice as an appropriate sized rat will eliminate the need to feed 2 or more mice in a sitting. You should be able to go online as was suggested above to find bulk frozen rats at reasonable prices. Most use a 15% of the snakes body weight rule for feeders or feed a rat no larger (in width) than the fattest part of the snakes body. For my keepers, I use the latter and feed once every 3-4 days for my keepers until they reach 300 grams and then every 7 days after that.