prego mice.

[KORBIN5895]

So earlier this spring I was doing very well breeding mice in my shed. Because I am stupid I got rid of almost all my stock and started over....... which has really sucked. My question is I currently have 2 harems.
One has a female that will be giving birth within the next 2 days and the other had 2 females that will birth within the week.
Now I separate my females prior to birthing and put them in their own container. But I am short on room and was wondering if I could put all 3 together and if so when should I place the together.

[infernalis]

Should be fine, I always kept mine in colonies.

I keep my rats in colonies, and they do well.

[sassy_snake_lady]

I never removed any pregnant females. Just left them in large colonies and have never had any problems. All the females nurse each others babies so I find it is better than splitting them.

[infernalis]

It's a lot more natural for the mice also, Even the blokes help out in there.

One thing - any mouse that ever got caught eating or killing pinks was immediatly removed and fed to the python.

No one gets to steal my snake food and live to squeek about it.

[KORBIN5895]

Lol.I wasn't sure if it would be okay to mix females from different colonies. How big are your colonies?

[infernalis]

I used big poly totes (RUBS) and each one had dozens of mice in it.

[KORBIN5895]

Qhats the male female ratio?

[infernalis]

A couple happy guys per tote.

Ladies are less prone to fighting, so I feed off the animals with nads first.

Also females make pinkies, so they got treated like queens.

[sassy_snake_lady]

It's a lot more natural for the mice also, Even the blokes help out in there.

One thing - any mouse that ever got caught eating or killing pinks was immediatly removed and fed to the python.

No one gets to steal my snake food and live to squeek about it.

Yup, same here. I had one female eat a whole litter of 12 pinks a few weeks back. Was not happy and she was snake food that same day!

I had 4 large tubs (64L size) and had around 10 females and 2 males in each. I also found the males to be great dads. They would sit on the nests and warm the babies just as the mums would.

[KORBIN5895]

Originally I was running 5 colonies of 10 mice @2:8. They were in 10 gallon tanks or the equivalent mouse cage with the deep freeze being my grow out tank.. I was selling them to the pet store at a month old. The pet store need some extra mice and I was planning on insulating my aged so I only kept one colony of hoppers and sold them the rest with a 30% mark up. After trading a couple of males for females and had a 2:8 ratio again. I have had adults die off. I have had several still borne and I went out one day to find my last prego gave birth to one pink and a bunch of parts. So I traded all of them in for new mice and put two colonies of 1:4 . So I that was why I wanted to segregate my pregos. But I will put the pregos back in with the male and try that.

[KORBIN5895]

Yesssssssssss!!!!!! She just had about 10 pinks.

[infernalis]

Cool... my snakes are drooling already. :)

[KORBIN5895]

One still born and another one I thought was but she picked it up and it moved. But as of this afternoon 3 are dead and 6 are thriving!

[KORBIN5895]

I guess I can't count she apparently had 7 with one being still born.

[infernalis]

feed the dead ones to a snake.

[KORBIN5895]

My smallest snake eats adult mice. But I did import a bunch of frozen rodent for resale so I will put them in the bag of pinkies I already have.