Mice Breeding Basics

I've started a new colony of mice to help feed my growing ball python collection. I've decided to direct my attention towards breeding ball pythons although I will still breed Bearded Dragons and Uromastyx yearly. Buying mice weekly started to accumulate to roughly $100 a month so I weighed my options. I was able to pick up a few used mouse racks, $20 a piece, from a friend locally. You could easily build your own rack system, just check YouTube for instructional videos or try the Google on the internet device and I'm sure it wouldn't cost much more than what I paid. Now I spend $16 a month on a 24lb bag of Special Kitty cat food, $10 on 8lb bag of Hartz: Large Bird Diet,  a 50lb bag of Kent Cubes Rodent Diet (you can usually find this at your local feed store) for $20 that lasts forever, the water is free as we're on a well and I buy a huge $20 bag of shredded aspen to avoid mites, roughly every 3 months. That brings my monthly grand total to approximately $35. The only drawback is having hundreds of mice in my garage, make sure they can't escape, that could be seen as a "problem". I guess hundreds of mice colonizing in the walls of your home might be a bad thing. If you're not scared of mice and you might actually kind of think they're cute like I do then I recommend breeding your own mice if you own more than 3 ball pythons. The advantages out weigh the cons in my situation. I'm ensuring that I'm feeding top quality healthy mice to my snakes, I'm saving close to $65 a month on the mouse bill and I love animals so the more the merrier! As of now I have 2 racks with 6 tubs each but I'm thinking about upgrading to a new rack after purchasing a breeding pair of rats. My larger ball pythons prefer rats and I realize they have a higher nutritional value than mice but I'm always worried for the safety of my snakes. Mice will cower in the corner once they realize a predator is in the 10 gallon Rubbermaid Roughneck with them while rats will take a defensive position and fight back. If you own ball pythons then you know exactly what I'm talking about. My bumblebee, Loki, can't stand rats, not even rat pups but mice are like candy to him and I'm pretty sure 99% of all other ball pythons on this Earth. Loki had a bad experience with a rat when he was younger and I just can't get him back on rats for some reason. If anyone has any pointers for me it would be great to hear your educated opinion. I also prefer live over frozen thawed feeders and I don't own a deep freeze. I've included some pictures of my mouse racks below along with some mouse pups and the aspen bedding I use, check it out.

Golden Rule #2 Remove your male mice as soon as your females look pregnant!