- Hey, good morning, everybody, and welcome to the vlog.
I hope the start of your day is incredible.
And do you know that I've been saying that
for four years now, in a couple days?
That's right, the day after Thanksgiving
will be the four-year mark that I started daily vlogging.
Of course, I've been YouTubing
for years and years, like 13 years,
but the daily vlog is on its four-year anniversary
in just a couple days.
How crazy is that?
Well, today is another awesome day.
We are gonna actually start breeding ball pythons.
So what I mean by that
is we're just gonna get males and females together.
If you didn't see the video
when we moved all of the females around,
I'll put a card right up here, you can check that out,
and see how we rearranged things to try to organize.
And I'll just kinda go through, and the fact
that we're gonna be putting males in with females,
and start talking about kinda my philosophy
about snake breeding.
Hey, you guys know my life is about The Reptarium,
and education, and all that stuff, but I have always been,
and still will always be a snake breeder by heart.
And I love this time of year.
It's super exciting because, again,
when you start breeding snakes this time of the year,
it's like every animal, you think is gonna produce, right?
The expectations are super high.
You never know what's gonna happen.
And it's just really a fun time of the year.
So today, males go in with females,
and later on, we'll check and see
if there's any early lockups.
(funky rock music)
So, remember how we actually have all of the males in order,
compared to what they're being bred to.
So this is the number one male here.
He's a pastel leopard clown ball python,
and he's actually being bred
to a pastel leopard clown female.
I'm gonna go ahead, just set him in there.
And that will be the first female
of all these things you can see, all these ones.
These are the ones that go here.
He's gonna breed all these,
and then we're on to next, which is the banana clown.
So then we just go to literally cage number two,
and get the banana clown.
And hoo doggy. I tell you what.
This is one beautiful snake.
Again, female number one is a vanilla red stripe.
And I'm just gonna go ahead,
put the male banana clown in there.
And then I just kinda repeat that over.
Now, a couple things.
I'm gonna have tags that that male
will follow around to every,
so when he goes from this cage to this cage,
that tag will go like this, and so on and so forth,
so we can keep things together.
Now, some people have said, "Why don't you barcode stuff,
or do some kind of a QR code type of thing?"
Which can really work, to be honest.
I know a lot of people that did.
We actually even invested in a software to do that
about eight or nine years ago.
The problem is, I want to look at the cage.
I want to see the information,
so in real time, I know exactly what's going on.
And we've talked about how the three big things
that really help you produce snakes are what?
Follicles, feeding, and copulation, right?
So, I can see here, this one just fed,
and, basically, now I can go through and say,
"All right, that's fed, now it's bred,
now we got follicles."
I can see it right there.
I don't have to access a computer or look on my phone.
I can see it on the front.
I'm old school. That's the way I like to do it.
But I can get so much more information
by visually just looking at the cage.
Now, hey, listen, it's maybe not as organized,
but at the same time, for me, it's worked,
and that's the way we're gonna do it.
So, we're gonna get all of these males
in with all of these females.
- (laughing) You can't put that in the vlog.
- [Brian] What did I miss the opportunity?
- I was listening to you film,
and, really, there's just the three Fs.
- [Brian] The three Fs?
- Yeah. - [Brian] What?
- So, you said it was follicles, feeding, and (beep).
Three Fs. - All right,
don't listen to that, kids.
(both laugh)
(funky rock music)
Not sure if you guys remember when we got Drama, of course,
right side up and upside down smiley face pied.
Well, this is the first year that Drama is gonna get bred,
and we're gonna actually take him
just to a pied female to start.
It's not a really big girl.
She's only about 1500 grams, but she's absolutely gorgeous.
So, hopefully, pied to pied, with recessive mutation,
means that they're all gonna be pieds.
Unfortunately those pied emojis
with the smiley face don't pass on,
but still, it'll be pretty cool
to hopefully get some offspring from Drama finally.
I'm excited about this one.
You guys may remember, about a year and a half ago,
that I unboxed a banana GHI,
and Lori didn't want me to keep it.
Well, she finally let me keep it, and it's up to size,
and I'm actually gonna take it
to one of my favorite mutations of all.
And that, of course, is the GHI Mojave female here.
There'll be potential for super GHIs
and all kinds of different combinations there.
So, again, with that banana stuff,
I can't imagine what a banana super GHI is gonna look like.
It's gonna be absolutely ridiculous.
Basically, what I'm gonna do in the beginning of the season
is I really want to get the males and females together
for about a week and a half.
So, normally, we're gonna breed
maybe four, five days a week,
and then we're gonna give 'em a couple days off,
so that they can rest up,
and get some food in 'em and stuff like that.
But, usually, the first cycle,
I really want to get those males in,
and have a lot of time with those males
kinda bouncing around, right?
The more they're in there,
it's gonna spur on females to want to feed more.
And feeding more is gonna grow follicle growth,
which is gonna cause more copulation,
and all that type of stuff.
So, it's important to kinda give 'em a real good push
in the beginning, right?
So, every day, that male is gonna get switched
to a new female's cage, right?
So it's only one day.
If he doesn't breed her, then he goes to another cage.
If he does breed her, I'll typically give him a day off,
and then go back into the breeding cycle.
But for this first cycle,
they're gonna kinda do that every day
for about eight or nine days
before I give 'em their first break, and feed 'em.
So, let's hope, later on, we can come back and check,
and get our first locks of the season.
I know I mentioned that my black-throat monitor
typically is gonna be feeding on bugs,
but I do want to offer a pinky every now and then,
and just see if he's interested in,
oh yeah, he's interested in it.
That's for, and you guys dropped a ton
of great comments about his name,
but the one thing I forgot to tell you guys,
you want another one, buddy?
Oh my, this dude is a monster!
Is that when these guys get bigger,
I know you guys aren't gonna believe me about this,
but when these guys get bigger, they smell like maple syrup.
That's right. Almost like a pancake.
So, I'm trying to think of a name that kinda goes with that
because when we're educating people, we can be like,
"Hey, guess what, take a sniff."
And they're gonna be like, "Oh my God.
It smells like a waffle with maple syrup
or something like that."
So I'm thinking maybe Waffles, or something on that lines.
But let me know in the comments
what you guys think about that.
And, oh, and by the way, I did want to tell you,
there's a storm that's gonna be coming.
And that's one of the main reasons
why we wanted to get the males in with females today,
because later on, we're gonna be able to check it out,
and hopefully we'll get some breeding.
Guess what guys.
(chuckling) Just a couple days away from Black Friday!
That's right, the day after Thanksgiving
at midnight Thursday slash Friday morning,
from midnight to midnight, we have a Black Friday sale.
It's like our 12th annual Black Friday sale.
Every single thing on the site, BHBReptiles.com, is on sale.
So if you're looking for, whatever it is,
I mean, anything that we have on the site,
go to BHBReptiles.com, again, savings on everything,
only for 24 hours, midnight to midnight.
So again, Black Friday, BHB, go check that out.
(funky rock music)
So that's it. All the males are in with females.
And I'm not gonna lie to you.
(chuckling) Every year, I make a mistake.
And what I mean by that is that as I'm putting males in,
I'm like, "Oh my God.
I forgot to put the male in the right spot.
Now I have to rearrange everything once again."
I was impressed. I mean, we didn't miss anything.
Everything went 100% as planned,
and it's so much easier to organize.
I'm telling you, if you do this type of stuff, organize now,
because it will save you so much time in the future.
So I'm gonna give these guys maybe two or three hours.
We'll come back and check on 'em.
And by the way, we're gonna have a bunch of males
that are three, four-year-old males
that are just kinda retired.
New batch of males up this year.
So we're gonna put a bunch of new males on the website,
hopefully, for the Black Friday sale.
So, again, BHBReptiles.com,
and you can get a male if you're interested in breeding
and you need something.
They're really gonna be great animals.
It's just, now I have new males, I don't need 'em.
So there's probably gonna be 30 or 40 males available
that are adults, that would be, again,
no older than five years, no younger than three years.
So, keep an eye out for that.
And we'll come back here in a couple hours,
and check and see if we have any first locks.
You know, big snakes, big poops, right?
But this is actually not a poop here.
This is always interesting.
This is what they call a urate, right?
And look at how huge this is.
I mean, that is just absolutely insane.
This is actually, basically like solidified urine.
So again, what snakes do is that they will urinate,
but they also have this solidified, kinda calcified urine
called a urate.
And Daisy is notorious for that.
And it doesn't really have a smell to it, per se,
maybe a little bit pee-like type smell,
but it's not terrible.
But, just gotta get her cleaned up and get her ready,
'cause there's always a lot of work around here.
But again, ooh, she's coming out.
She's saying, "Hey what's up, Dad?"
Hey, you stay away.
Woo. I think that she's ready to eat.
She just had a big rabbit just the other day,
but I gotta be careful of her.
Daisy, you're such a beautiful girl.
Tell you what, love her,
but always a lot of maintenance over here at The Reptarium.
(chuckling) And like I mentioned,
it always seems so glamorous to work with reptiles,
and don't, and all animals for that matter,
and don't get me wrong, it is amazing,
but the majority of the work you're gonna do
is gonna be cleaning stuff up.
I mean, this Mandarin rat just shed out,
and she kinda messed her cage up,
and I just gotta clean her up.
But look at this beautiful snake right here.
I mean, holy moly, this is, again, a Chinese rat snake
that is just absolutely stunning.
This is from the Sichuan region,
so they have a lot more yellow,
a little bit more clean, and stuff like that.
But, again, just doing maintenance,
gotta always be cleaning cages up, cleaning poops up,
cleaning sheds up, feeding, cleaning, watering,
all that type of stuff.
So, again, working with animals
sometimes seems like a real glamorous job,
but the truth is, most of the time,
it's just a lot of hard work.
(funky rock music)
And as you can see, guys, the storm is coming.
The first snow of the year.
And I've mentioned before
that when you have a drop of barometric pressure,
that's when you get a lot of copulations.
So I'm assuming that this drop of barometric pressure,
i.e. this snow storm, is gonna cause some copulations.
What do you say we go downstairs,
and, fingers crossed, we find some males breeding.
And again, with the fact that they've only been together
for a very short period of time, it's hard to say
that anything is gonna be breeding or not.
So I'm just gonna kinda take a peek at all the stuff.
So guess what. (chuckling) First cage.
This is actually a pastel pied bred to just a het pied,
and we've already got our first lock.
So that's amazing.
So, what I'm gonna do is just basically very gently close,
'cause I don't want to disturb them, right?
I'm now gonna mark on the enclosure that it's breeding,
and I'll start to keep track of all of that type of stuff.
Let's go on to number two.
This is actually a really cool pairing here.
This is a spy to an albino pied.
But unfortunately they're not hooked up.
So, it's just exciting.
I can't believe we got our first lock of the year,
even just after a couple of hours of them being together.
So, again, just gonna kinda be going through everything.
Oh, we got another lock!
This is actually that really cool pairing.
This is the first time this banana GHI
has ever been in with a female.
Literally the first time he's ever been in.
Bred to a GHI Mojave, and we have a lock.
Oh my gosh. So that is always amazing.
I tell you what, this storm definitely helped out.
Continuing on, this guy is actually really cool.
This is actually a bumblebee fire orange dream,
bred to a lemon blast orange dream.
Unfortunately, not hooked up, but that's okay.
And again, we're having some pretty good success already,
and we only checked a handful of animals.
We've got another breeding here.
This is actually an albino to a het albino.
This is a first-time male too.
This is actually a banana super chocolate
bred to a chocolate pinstripe.
Looks like he's got some courtship going on.
So we started off strong,
and now we're kinda faltering a little bit here.
Oh, we got a lock.
This, again, this is a first-time animal.
This is that pastel bamboo vanilla, and it's bred to a fire.
So I'm gonna just shut this really quick.
A first-time male.
Again, that first breeding for the first-time male
is so important, 'cause once he starts breeding,
now he's gonna be on a three or four-month breeding thing.
So that is amazing that two of our first-time males
are already hooked up today.
You can see, this as a good example
of a male that's trying, he's courting,
he's riding the female, got a little bit of thing,
but there's no actual lock, which is completely fine,
because the truth is, is that these first breedings
probably aren't gonna do a whole lot for production.
But what they're gonna do
is turn the females on to follicular growth,
as well as just having a male in with a female
oftentimes causes her to feed more.
And again, I've talked about the fact that more food
equals more follicle growth, means more copulation,
and then that means more potential for production.
So, that is the first start, right?
So the copulations here
really aren't gonna be that incredible for us,
but what they are gonna do is start the process.
And you gotta remember, we're literally just a couple hours
(chuckling) into the breeding season, right?
So we got a long, long way to go.
This is another male
that is kinda looking like some courtship here,
but doesn't have any actual locks going on.
So, just a couple more females to check.
And then, if that's it,
it looks like we got another lock here.
So we got another lock here.
So yeah, things are going really well.
I didn't expect to have this many males
and females locked up this early in the season,
(chuckling) just literally a couple of hours into it.
So, that's it. Looks like maybe about eight or 10 locks.
That is amazing for the first time.
Over the next few months,
we are definitely gonna have some good, good production.
So, I'm excited, guys. The season has started.
Absolutely amazing that we have so many breeding
so early in the season.
So, I have a feeling that 2021
is gonna be a banger of a year.
If you guys enjoyed this video,
here is a playlist of the same breeding stuff,
all kinds of stuff you can take a look at.
If you don't mind, right up here,
you can subscribe to my podcast channel called Checking In.
I hope you're subscribed over here to this vlog channel.
If you're not, hit the subscription button,
and turn all your post notifications on.
Have an absolutely wonderful day.
Remember, be kind to someone,
and I promise, I'll see ya tomorrow.