I have no idea how many adults and subadults I have. I probably don't even want to know. Matter of fact, I do know that I need to sell off some of them, because I am running out of cage space and refuse to build a larger building. Last year I produced around 4,000 babies and the year prior, around 6,000. If I don't sell off some adults before breeding season, I may well surpass that 6,000 mark this year, and quite honestly I REALLY don't want that many babies to take care of. The best analogy I can think of concerning getting that many babies hatching out is like trying to take a sip of water from a firehose at full blast.
And it is MORE then a full time job. Bear in mind that you will have to have your own rodent colony as well. You can't depend on an outside source for something like that which is so absolutely critical for your business. Between the rodents and the snake care, prepare to give up any idea of taking vacations or having any kind of a social life. You may be able to get away for 2 or maybe 3 days at a shot, but something is going to suffer from it when you are gone. The phrase you will hear yourself saying most often to friends and relatives is "darn, I really would like to get away, but things are just too hectic around here right now."
As for the number of babies you can support, the general rule of thumb is figuring out how many 1 day old pinky mice you can get per day when the babies have hatched out. Multiply that times the feeding frequency you want to maintain (5 to 7 days), and that will give you your answer for the MAXIMUM number of babies you can maintain at your peak hatching season. As a example, suppose you can get 500 1 day old pinkies each and every day, and you want to feed your baby snakes every 5 days, rain or shine. That is 2,500 baby snakes you can maintain per feeding period. If you stretch out the feeding schedule to every 7 days, then you can support 3,500 baby snakes. If you start stretching out the feeding schedule to maintain more snakes on the same number of available pinky mice, then you begin reaching a point of diminishing returns. There is a point, depending on individual metabolisms of the babies, where the snakes will die even if they are feeding at every meal you offer. This point averages around 10 to 12 days, but I have seen some individuals that required a much shorter time span between feedings. So you can see the risk attached to trying to make your pinky supply stretch further.
Another point to consider with the above numbers is that it takes me roughly 1 minute per baby snake to clean and feed them each cycle. So at that time of year, with 2,500 babies, I would need to put in roughly 41 hours per every 5 days ONLY for their care. And that is being extremely optimistic.
Even if you have a very large mouse colony being maintained, I would strongly suggest that you take at a prudent insurance policy by having at least 10,000 1 day old pinky mice in the freezer at the start of hatching season. Then replenish it each time you get that number down to around 5,000. That will give you a bit of a buffer in case something catastrophic happens to your mouse colony at the worst time.
Oh, and one final thing. This business is EXTREMELY labor intensive. My wife and I are reaching the point where we just may not be able to keep up with the labor involved and the grueling schedule it requires at it's peak demands. Each year this is getting harder and harder to do, and I am certain we will not be able to keep it up for too many more years. Perhaps you will be able to find skilled and qualified help, but unfortunately this has proven to be difficult to find where we are located. So bear that in mind. If you are giving up a career to pursue this full time, look as far into the future as you can. Are you giving up something that you will not be able to get back into in 10 years when you find that the demands of this business are more then you are willing to give for the rest of your life?
And after you have sweated blood and given up most of your life to do this, you will go to shows and have your animals on display to sell at what you think are reasonable and competitive prices, only to have someone next to you who only does this as a lark selling their animals at half your prices. I ran a poll on one of my other websites a long while back, asking people what they thought a "good show" was in relation to selling their animals as a vendor there. I was shocked to see that many people felt that breaking even (considering the cost of doing the show) was "good", as far as they were concerned. Well, if you are doing this full time and your total income needs to come from the selling of your animals, breaking even is NOT "good". But that is what you are competing against in the marketplace. People who just want to sell their animals for some pocket change and don't care what they actually get for them as long as they get rid of them and don't have to take them back home. Doing this as a "businessman", you will find it extremely difficult to compete with "hobbyists", because their overhead is nothing at all like yours is.
This is mostly the reason why so many "businesses" in this industry that were here 5 years or more ago, are no longer around. And it is why many of the businesses existing today, will NOT be here 5 years from now.
At times the heartbreaks and disappointments will shake and diminish nearly to the point of nonexistence the love you have just in doing this sort of work. And for many people the love and interest of what they are doing will just not be enough to sustain them.
Not trying to put a damper on your enthusiasm, but I'll be honest about it, I often wonder if my going into this full time and quitting my state job I had was really the smartest thing for me to do. I find that I am absolutely dreading hatching season more and more every year when I think of the work load attached to it. Yes, I have made a pretty good business out of this, but the cost to everything else in my life has been pretty harsh.
Oh, very last point and I am done. If your spouse does not support you FULLY and 100 percent in this (and I mean by digging in and actively HELPING), then all is lost. Many spouses will tolerate your 24/7 commitment for a while, but not for the rest of their lives. Sooner or later you will have to chose between one or the other. I am lucky in this regard, but many people have not been, and will not be.
