Reptile & Amphibian Forums

OK well i have had 1 mal and 1 mouse together for 3 weeks...i8 then seperated the femasile into another cage and 3 weeks latr she still didnt have a baby so i just fed her to my snake......Then i had a male and a very small 3 month old femal together for 3 weeks and now she looks a lil bigger 3 weeks latr n still no babies what can i do i need babies any tips...? is it better to just wait til the female comes into heat and then introduce her to the male ,let them mate and put her back please help?

Keep them together and don't lose patients, when she is a large mother then seperate them and allow her to have her babies and hope she won't eat them. Look on the web, you will find alot of sites to answer all your questions, can't depend on ppl here, sometimes your questions seem retarded to them and they won't answer. the net is the best advise yet.
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My roomates are2 boas, 4 corns,Rotti,3cats and snake food AKA the food chain.

Here are a few things I've learned~ People tend to make it more work than it needs to be and stress the rodents~

1. Don't seperate the males and females. You can get away with this with rats (and it is a debate if it is preferable or not when breeding feeders) but Mice are nasty little critters and if you seperate the colony you may never be able to re-combine. Even if you get lucky enough to re-combine successfully breeding will be slow.

2. Like the other poster said~ be patient. It's a waiting game sometimes. Try not to obsess over them~ you'll just stress them out. Leave them alone to take care of business.

3. Run a colony of 1.3 to 1.5 Put the colony together~ LEAVE IT ALONE. Don't "take out"~ "feed off"~ or "Give a break"~ disturb to feed and clean~ thats it. (Cleaning is very important~ don't neglect that)

4. If your mouse is pregnant~ you'll be able to tell. She won't be a little heavy~ she'll look like she is going to explode~ and when you think she can't possibly get any larger~ then she'll get a bit fatter before she drops the pups.

Hope those help.
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Cheryl Marchek
AKA JM
Check out my website at:
The Red Dragons Den

There are several reasons why the females didn't have babies. One, they are too old to breed, or too young. Two, separating them from the male in 3 weeks is stressful and not necessary. It's best to keep one male in with one or more females and leave him in there. Males rarely if ever cause harm to babies, especially when they are the father. Female mice can eat their own young but I never had any problem with this myself but then again I bought my females young and socialized them alot to get used to me. I would hold them and play with them at least till i wound up buying more to breed for my snake.

My mice I kept in large enclosures with an exercise wheel, water and high protein/fat food and often I would watch them play. Sometimes I would hold them but never when they were close to having babies. I never handled the babies or bothered the mothers when less than a week old and try to work cleaning around times the mothers recently gave birth. I have never had mothers that ate their babies except for one time when a mother decided to have her babies minutes before I started taking everybody else out of the cage to clean it. I put her and what babies she had aside to hopefuly not stress her out but she started eating her babies so I put her elsewehre and the babies I just mixed up with other pinkies only a few days older. This worked as once everybody was back together in the now clean cage, the new pinks survived.

Rats are not as prone to eating their own young but take a bit longer for a new colony to get settled enough to breed.I bought a pair of rats to breed and it was nearly two months before the first batch of babies came. I kept two females from that batch and will let them add to the colony.

One of the females I kept is a nice tan hooded white with black eyes. Very pretty.