Blog
Our Sixth Year (September 2010 - August 2011)
February 19, 2011. How our lives have changed dramaticallyover the past few months. We went to the Anaheim show last September and came home with two of Jim's grandsons who are now living with us and going to college. We love them dearly and are happy to be providing them with experiences that they would otherwise never have had. They are helping with our snakes--still not touching the animals, but are doing chores and helping keep the snake room clean. Just before Thanksgiving, my son and his family moved out of our basement apartment to a different state where my newly graduated daughter-in-law took a nursing job. That reduced the number in our household from ten to five. One of my younger sons is still with us. I would rather have a full house than an empty nest!
We are in the middle of our breeding season and things are going well. We have one young male Ivory that hasn't figured it out yet, but we are hoping he will shortly. Our little runty pied male has turned into a breeding machine! He is
winning first prize as the top male breeder in our collection this year! We picked him up in Denver 3 years ago as a yearling and he would barely eat. He is still under 400g, but something clicked this year and he is off and running as a 4 year old--FINALLY! He is proof that size really doesn't matter! Check out his picture at right that shows him mating with a pastel female five times his size. We are hoping he will now change his eating habits and start gaining some weight.
We are looking for our first ovulations to occur in the next few weeks. We have had to give up our egg room--a walk-in closet in one of the downstairs bedrooms--since we have a household full of people now. So we are going to convert a couple of commercial freezers into incubators instead. We really must get going on that project right away so we can be ready.
October 5, 2010. It hardly seems possible that we are actually in our 6th year with this business. It has been a wonderful experience so far. This year we hatched 31 clutches--the most we've ever hatched. We expanded our hatchling racks and have sold off lots of normals. We are now focusing on getting our collection up to visible animals only, although we are keeping Pandora, our very first ball and Goldie, who gave us some very interesting babies this year that we are going to line breed.
We had our best show ever in Salt Lake City this past weekend thanks to our many returning customers and new ones as well. It was good to see old friends and get reports on how well the animals they purchased from us are doing.
We hatched out lots of firsts this year--a little piebald male that has amazing patterning, lessers, cinnamons, mojaves, peweters, spiders, and spider het albinos. We picked up a desert, an enchi pair, a lemonback (fire), a spider het pied, and an abherrent normal that looks very interesting. We are cooking up breeding plans for our champagne and others that have us pretty excited for the coming season. Plus, we still have a six clutches in the incubator, two of which are possible lavender albinos from our male that we hope to prove out this year.
Our Fifth Year (September 2009-August 2010)
April 22, 2010. We have decided to change our name! We have found that our .biz domain isn't the most ideal situation, so we went in search of a .com domain and much to our delight, regiuspythons.com was available! So, our new name is Regius Pythons. We love it! And we hope that it will be an easy change for all our good customers to make. It will be operational in early May. I'm working on the logo right now.
April 16, 2010--What is up with the egg-laying timing this year??? By this time last year we had about 1/2 of our clutches laid and this year we have only one clutch so far--11 eggs. We think we will have about 25 clutches coming--maybe more, but the girls are so late this year. It has been a long winter here in Utah this year, but without much snow here in the valley. Not sure that has much to do with it, but blaming in on the weather seems convenient. We are excited about our possibilities this year. We are proving out a couple of our males we picked up at the Wasatch show in Salt Lake 3 years ago--a het genetic stripe and a het lavender albino. They are both breeding with their daughters this season and at least two daughters from each father seem to be gravid--maybe more.
February 2, 2010. Wow--it is already 2010. The time goes by so fast when we are busy, and busy is an understatement for our lives! As you can see, I am re-designing our Web site using CSS. It is like learning a new language and I am still such a novice. But it looks better. I'll just have to clean up the tags later. Breeding is well underway and we have some exciting combinations in the works--at least we hope. We should have our first eggs next month. It is still winter here in Utah with some residual snow still lingering and the air quality in the red zone much of the time with the temperature inversions that plague our valleys in the winter. We are longing for spring, but it will still be a few weeks yet. But I see some telltale signs--swelling of the buds on the willow tree, and iris leaves popping up in the front flower beds. That is enough to keep our hope for warmer weather alive!
October 31, 2009--Halloween today and the neighborhood is already hopping with children practicing their trick or treat lines. And it is still several hours before dark! I think we are going to get slammed! Breeding has begun and several of our males are really going to town--Smiley, our albino, hasn't met a girl he doesn't like this season. And George, our new ghost we just purchased from VMSHerp is a crazy man. Beethoven, our possible het lavender albino is going strong for the third straight year--this time with 3 of his daughters. This is hopefully the year we will prove him out. We have lots of customers out there who have purchased breeding packages fathered by him who are as anxious as we are to have him prove out. I've been busy making changes to our Web site. We bought a new Canon Rebel camera--once I figured it out with a little help from my friends my pictures are starting to be a great improvement over the previous pictures we had posted. It was cold and stormy most of the week, but today is beautiful. The entire neighborhood is out working in their yards. We cleaned out the garden and pruned the rose bushes today. Winter will soon be upon us. But we are hoping for one more outing in our trailer with our four wheelers before the snows fly.
October 6, 2009--We are finally catching our breath after a whirlwind few weeks. The Salt Lake City show last weekend was the last one for us for the season, and we have nearly sold out of all of our inventory. We have just a few animals left. It was good to see old friends and our good local customers at the Salt Lake show and we appreciate all the kind things that were said to us about our customer service and the quality of our animals. We love this business! My son, David, helped us out. He is a natural salesman because he is so knowledgable about genetics and the different morphs, and he has a natural affinity for people. He is designing and building new acrylic showcases for our animals for next year and we are excited about his creative ideas. He is a very talented young man. We cleaned out the snake room today to get ready for breeding season, which is nearly upon us. We started cooling a little early this year due to the weather and the fact that several of our males were already making sperm plugs. We could have as many as 40 clutches next year, which will be more than double of any previous year. We are making some equipment purchases to help upgrade the quality of our Web site, our picture-taking ability, and our show display. It will be a busy winter for us!
September 28, 2009--We returned at 4:30 AM from the Sacramento Show this morning after driving all night to get home so we could teach our Monday morning classes at our respective universities today! We are zombies!!! We had a great show in Sacramento this year--made many new friends and saw some of our regular customers--it was great to see and meet everyone, and thank you all for a great show. Jeremy and Angel did a fantastic job of advertising the show--thousands of people were there. Many people we talked to had never been to a reptile show before. We appreciate the advance advertising that attracted so many new fans to the world of reptiles. We purchased 8 new snakes this months--found a great pied girl in Sacramento. Our last show of the season is in Salt Lake this coming weekend. We expect to sell most of our remaining inventory this weekend and then settle into the fall breeding season.
September 22, 2009--Our champagne arrived this morning and what a beauty she is! Beautiful coloring--we are naming her Bubbles after the circular patterning along her back. I will be posting her picture later today on the Our Collection page. We have been asked what we are going to breed her to, but we have made no decisions yet. We will see what is produced over the next two years and then decide.
September, 2009--Anaheim was a blast this year! We met many new people and saw all the amazing ball python morphs--some new and some not quite new. Our favorites: the Panda Pied, the Champagne, and the Crystal. We just purchased our first champagne and are so excited for her to arrive tomorrow. Then we head to the Sacramento show, followed by the Salt Lake show the following week-end. This is a hectic time of year for us!
Our Fourth Year (September 2008-August 2009)
August, 2009--What a wild and busy year this was! Obviously I severely neglected this blog. We had a great breeding season this year--produced Ivories, Bumblebees and a Super Pastel. Jim's and my job are crazy this year. We have lots of classes to teach, lots of grading to do, and it keeps us pretty busy. We also have a couple of my sons living with us temporarily--and two of my grandchildren, so life is great! It is wonderful to have children in the house again. My daughter-in-law will complete her nursing degree this year, then they will move away, so I am enjoying every minute of grandmother time I can get!
Our Third Year (September 2007-August 2008)
July, 2008--We are having an off year this breeding season, but it seems we are not alone as we talk to other breeders in our area. We had only half the clutches this year that we had last year and, and not much luck with some of the morphs we were hoping for. But we do have five beautiful het ivories--SK line, and some gorgeous pastels. We have a couple more clutches to go, so we will see what happens. So far we think we will only do shows in Salt Lake City and maybe Las Vegas and Denver. But there is always next year, and we are already thinking ahead about which animals we are going to pair up. Pam will have more genetics books ready for the shows this year.
October 7, 2007--We had three fun and wildly successful shows in Anaheim, Salt Lake City and Sacramento. Thank you to all of our wonderful new customers--it was such a pleasure to get acquainted and to share our enthusiasm for ball pythons. We met some amazing people--both breeders and new customers--we LOVE this business! By the end of the Sacramento show we were sold out of our hatchlings and our breeding packages, so we were very pleased about that. We have about a dozen hatchlings left here that had not yet fed enough times to take to the shows. We will be posting them on the Available page just as soon as they have had another meal or two and are well-started. Meanwhile, we have begun to drop temperatures in our snake room and increase hours of darkness in preparation for the 2008 breeding season. We have our breeding plan all laid out and are hoping for several visible morphs this coming year including pastels, spiders, axanthics, piebalds, yellow bellies, harlequin wide stripes and albinos. Pam's genetics booklets were hot sellers, especially at the Sacramento show, so she is working on Series II for next season. She is also nearly finished with another book--How To Breed, Raise, and Sell Ball Pythons. We will anounce its publication on the home page in a few weeks.
September 2007--What a busy month with school starting for Jim and me, and three shows to get ready for, there wasn't time for much else. Seventeen, our tiny twin, continues to thrive. He is up over 30 grams now and eating like a champ. He finally shed, although it was a bad shed. Later this fall I will do a picture narrative on him and post it here--he is an amazing little guy! Our last clutch hatched this month--het to het axanthic breeding--no axanthics, so that was a disappointment. The final total for this season was 105 eggs and 105 healthy hatchlings (one twin with birth defects died). We just realized that we are starting our third year in the business this month--WOW--it has gone by so fast.
Our Second Year (September 2006-August 2007)
August, 2007--"Seventeen", as we have named our tiny surviving twin (he weighed 17 grams at hatching), is so amazing. He is still hanging on even though he has not shed. He does have a strong feeding response and took a gerbil pinky when he was 3 weeks old, and has taken a tiny mouse pinky every week since. He is up to 23 grams! We had three more clutches hatch--got our first ALBINOS! In a het to het breeding with 5 eggs in the clutch, we got one male and one female albino--not bad odds! We are gearing up to attend shows in Anaheim, Salt Lake City and Sacramento next month. We will mostly have possible hets for several morphs--albino, axanthic, ghost, clown, genetic stripe and piebald. We are going to group them in breeding packages for customers interested in starter sets--we will see how that goes. We are looking forward to meeting more folks interested in ball pythons.
July, 2007--Five clutches hatched this month including one egg with twins sired by our 66% het lavender albino. One twin exhibed extreme birth defects and died almost immediately. The other twin was very small and we did not expect it to live. However, life is tenacious! The little guy hung on several days, so we moved him from the incubation room to the snake room and still he hung on. He weighed in at 17 grams! So tiny! We checked him several times every day. He drank some water on his 6th day. He did not shed when his siblings shed, and has not eaten, so we remain concerned.
June 29, 2007--We are having a banner year with this breeding season! So far, 14 of our females have laid eggs with an average clutch size of 6+ eggs--we have two clutches of nine and two of ten!. We have 88 eggs so far and 36 have hatched. Two more females are also gravid including our het axanthic female--so we have a 25% probability of getting an axanthic this year! We should hit 100 eggs when these two lay. Compared with the usual industry standard of 25% of copulating females who actually end up laying eggs, our 70% is amazing. We are collecting data to see if we can isolate what is going on over the long term. We were counting on only 6-8 of our breeding females to lay, so this really caught us off guard. With the average clutch size of five, we expected only about 40 eggs this year--we will more than double that! Our business plan is to grow slowly and precisely, producing a limited number of very high quality animals each year. I guess we are getting a pretty good jump start!
Pandora gave us one beautiful little female pastel--she is gorgeous! We will have clutches hatching clear into September with our most exciting morphs due to come in late August and September. We are also hatching out more females than males--13 to 23--but we will wait to see how the season ends before we get too excited! The more eggs that hatch, the closer we should move to the 50/50 mark. In any case, we continue to learn a lot. Jim is in San Diego at our first Reptile Expo. He took a dozen snakes including Pandora's pastel daughter.
April 22, 2007--Our second female laid a clutch of six eggs today. She is part of our genetic stripe project, although it will be next year before we really see valid results. We bred 23 females this year, and so far, 14 of them have ovulated, which means we may have 80+ eggs! That is a lot of babies for us!! We need to purchase a Vision hatchling rack right away in order to have it all set up and ready for the babies starting in June.
April 15, 2007--Pandora did it again! For the second year in a row, she laid a clutch of four egges. She was our only female to produce eggs last year, and is our first this year. This year we bred her to our young pastel, so her hatchlings should be half pastels. They are due to hatch the first week in June.
April 2007--After five months of working with our city here in Utah, the city council failed to pass an exotic animal ordinance that would have paved the way for us to acquire a business license. So, we are currently looking for other options. Stay tuned....
September 2006--We are starting our second year in the ball python breeding business this month. Our big news is that we have relocated to Utah where Pam is now teaching science education courses at a local university and Jim is teaching psychology and sociology courses at a couple of colleges. We will be moving into our new home in a few weeks and will be organizing our first true snake room in the basement portion of the home once we obtain our business license and appropriate permits. The most rewarding part of our move is being close to family--especially grandchildren!
Our First Year (September 2005-August 2006)