Hello, I recently built with my dad a large wooden shelf to put all my Ball Pythons on. Costed under $100, compared to a $2000 rack...but that's not the point.
I have about $2000 worth of Freedom Breeder racks, and I have had and built other racks of my own as well (some for less than $100). This $2000 rack is superior to anything I have ever built (or could build myself), but that's not the point.
I'm not saying your shelf doesn't work for your small collection, but that you shouldn't necessarily thumb your nose at some of the outstanding herp racks/cages that are available today. Are they expensive? Yes. Do I wish I had just built my own? Heck no!
I've decided to produce my own mice, since my collection is growing. I have one small BP, but the rest are adults. Do you think it would be alright if I bred my mice on one of the near top shelves?
Producing your own mice is fun, but I don't recommend doing it in your room with your snakes. The small of the mice will have one of two effects -
1. the snakes will be constantly bombarded with rodent smell which will make them more likely to bite (yes, ball pythons can bite, particularly if they are expecting food!)
2. The snakes will accommodate to the smell (just like people do when they live next to a feed lot, they literally no longer notice the smell). Once the snake accommodates, how are you going to stimulate them to feed?
I could handle the smell I think by keeping the cage clean.
You obviously haven't kept mice before. The smell can be amazing, even if you clean the cages every day.
The thing is, I would mainly need adult mice. I wouldnt really need the pinkies, fuzzies, or hoppers. If I raised them all up, I'd have too many mice to feed to my snakes.
Think about the numbers of mice you are going to need and the amount you will need to produce this many.
If you feed your BPs and average of 2 mice every 10 days (most people feed more, but let's be conservative). You will need 10 mice every 10 days, or 30 mice per month. That means you will need at least 2, but probably 3 females and one male. Then you will need the room to raise up 30 mice from pinkie to adult (2 months to reach ball python size).
So although you could keep the 1.3 mice in one cage, when you start to raise up babies, you will need enough caging for 30 at once. Of course, 1/2 way through the two month raising period, you will add another 30 babies to the mix and by the time the first 30 get to be ready to feed off, the second clutches will be hoppers and ready to move over to the raising cage. But of course, by two months the females will be coming of age and the males will start to fight, so you will have to separate them into small groups.
So you should have to maintain 64 mice at all times, just to keep your snakes fed at this conservative level (and adult ball python needs more than 2 mice every 10 days!). You (or the other residents of your house) might be able to stand the smell of 4 mice, but 64 mice is a significant amount of mouse urine and you would soon be very unpopular in your house.
Now, you could go with rats, since they are larger, smell (somewhat) less, and you wouldn't have to raise to offspring 2 months to make decent sized meals.
So, you will need about 1 small rat per snake every 10 days. These rats will need to be about 5 weeks old. But you can produce more than 5 small rats with one female.
So you have a single female and male and hopefully the produce a clutch every 5 weeks. If they produce 10 babies, you could feed off This way you could survive on one pair (if you froze the other 5 weanlings every feeding). This would work, but rats take up a lot more space than mice and 10 rats would need at least half the space of 60 mice. And the smell would be significant.
Now, if you have a garage or temperature controlled outbuilding where you could keep them, this might be OK, but your room would soon become unbearable. How do I know? I tried this once!
how do you tell the girl mice from the boys? I have 4 of them right now...they all look the same...they either have weird butts that stick out, or extremely large testicles...
Male mice have an obvious scrotum which females don't. If all your mice have these obvious testes, they are all males.
Many petstores only get male mice, as the breeders keep the females to replenish their stock.
any advice
Buy frozen feeders online. You will always have the size and number you need, and they don't smell!
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Chris Harrison
