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Re: Im going to be selling different ball python morphs.
Well I wish you a ton of luck, because you're going to need it! Breeding is not this easy process where you just toss 2 snakes together and instantly have a bunch of bouncing babies, and people are lined up at your door to pay for them fast. I don't even know where I would begin in advising you.. I would firstly get a top-notch incubator fully set up and regulated with flexwatt and a Helix or comparable thermostat. I would never skimp on a t-stat. I learned the hard way, using a hovabator back in 2006, and you know what I got? A bunch of dead eggs and heartbreak when our power went out and the incubator spiked when it went back on. Good t-stats are not cheap, and flexwatt is eather inexpensive, bit this will still cost you.. This is just for the heating elements, and assuming that you can make an incubator housing itself.. that would be something to research.
Then I would also get the potential hatchlings' housing ready before you even breed. I say this from bad experience.. I admit that I was cynical and did not think that my eggs would hatch. I am just a pessimist like that.. but my incubator kicked butt and I had lots of babies. We were able to put a rack together fast and buy tubs, but this is really somerhing that a potential breeder should have ready beforehand. There again you'll need another top-notch thermostat, flexwatt for all of the little tubs.
Now comes another fun part of breeding. Should you be rewarded with many smiling BP babies.. they need to eat. Small rats (fuzzies or maybe even pinks) or hopper mice. Once a week roughly. Let's say that you get 8 hatchlings, out on one breeding. That's the need for 32 smaller rats or hopper mice, a month. If you breed, it might seem easy to just pluck them out of your rat tanks.. but then you have nothing to grow up into subadults to feed your larger snakes.. this was my fun part here I know now to step it up before babies come this year; I am starting that now, running 10 female rats but I don't even think this will be enough and I plan on adding maybe 5? And one more male. If you do f/t, I don't know how you'd feed babies on this. The thing that triggered my babies' feeding response was the movement of the baby mice.
Then... the Joy of Selling! Selling any animal is wrought with stress. You'll get many window shoppers who try to ****er prices down, who want a 50-month payment plan.. who complain about shipping costs. I was extreeeemely fortunate to find two awesome buyers off of this site, but it was tough to sell the rest of my snakes. I finally found a local guy with a shop that will be happy to buy anything I hatch out from now on, so having potential sale venues is what you should do. You should always be financially and mentally prepared to keep everything that you produce until you can find a satisfactory buyer for it that fits with your ethics and ability to pay for the snake.
And.. oh joy of joys! Fedex! It took them 4 months to fully certify us. The only reasn that our rep said that it "only took this long" was because he bumped our legal paperwork up.. otherwise we would still be waiting. It is not easy..
There. I think that I said most of it. I didn't really get into readying the adults or any technical aspects of breeding, because better people than me have already made awesome sites about that (like one Adam Wysocki..) I am just giving you a few words about what curveballs breeding can toss you.
-Jen. Back in the hobby after a hiatus!
Ball pythons:
0.1 normal; 1.1 albino. 1.0 pied; 0.1 het pied; 1.0 banana.
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