Green Bean said:
I am trying to figure out if this is even worth doing. I have 3 corns. Right now the littlest is taking 1 pinky and the other 2 are taking 1 fuzzy each. Would it be a money saver to have 1 colony of mice? Cull some of the pinks and let some grow to fuzzy size then cull them. Have the male separate from the female of course after she's preg. then have them mate again when food gets low?
Also how much was the initial start up price for the first colony and accessories?
As Vinnyj said, you have to determine the cost effectivness and time factor involved to relate to your specific situation. I'll give you another example of the costs broken down for each...
Before I started breeding my own mice, I was purchasing enough feeders from a not so local store for 1.50 each (regardless of size - great deal for adults, not so great deal for pinks and fuzzies) for approximately 20-25 snakes on a weekly basis. So, we'll say 20 for the sake of the computations.
$1.50 x 20 x 52 = $1,560 (not including tax btw...) per year. That's roughly $130 per month. We decided that was way too much and bought 2 colonies to start. (was supposed to be one, but one of the mice was miss-sexed and we ended up with two.) which turns out to be about $6.5 per snake per month.
Now for the cost of keeping the 2 colonies. I was optomistic when I started, and purchased 2 medium critter keepers for about $8.00 a piece, bag of aspen shavings runs about $7 (20 liter bag that will last 1 - 1 1/2 months), small bag of lab blocks $9 (5lb bag) and 1 bag of commerical seed diet $6 (about 4-5 lbs I think) that would last little over a full month. So, total for the first month was: about $42.00 including tax.
Maintaining the colonies for each month after start = $26. That drops the monthly cost of feeding the snakes from $6.5 to $1.30. In an ideal world anyway...
Now, I quickly learned that 2 small colonies (1.2 each) would never be enough to support that many snakes, they just don't breed or grow that quickly.
That also doesn't calculate the time and effort put into keeping the mice cages clean and stink free. We currently clean out each tank 2-3 times a week (depending on population and how bad it looks - if one colony tends to produce more waste in a shorter amount of time we change it more often.) Our mice require ten times the care and maintenace of the snakes that they feed. (Or so it seems to me.) Yet, to this day it is more cost effective to maintain the colonies.
(We are up to 8 colonies that are breeders and 4 additional cages dedicated to the juveniles that will be fed off over the next couple of weeks. Plus one colony of rats.)
Costs:
$20 a month for bedding (Aspen that is used for both snakes and mice)
$30 a month on food (mixture of seed diet and lab blocks)
Total: $50 per month to maintain hundreds of mice, that feed 72 snakes cost per snake per month - $0.70. That's estimating the food costs of the mice high because we usually buy in bulk now when we can.
Bottom line...
If you can deal with the mice (cleaning and other mice related issues), plan on purchasing more snakes sometime in the future, and find getting feeders from a local source a bit high or hard to find - it might be worth it to you to breed your own mice. But, it really depends on your situation... might be more cost effective to order on-line from somewhere like rodent pro. With less mess and clean up involved. :shrugs:
Jenn... *sinks back into lurk mode*
