Thinking...

[mykee]

I've produced over 1500 ball pythons since I started breeding and I've always sold out by Christmas of the same year, without exception. Keep in mind that I'm in Southwestern Ontario (an hour west of Toronto) so my market is substantially smaller (1/10th) of yours.
If you're not going to breed ball pythons, you're doing your pocketbook a disservice.

"Yuppers and they look amazing, or get a pied and breed it with a lavander albino and make dreamsicles they sell for 3k as well that project will take at least five years to produce a dreamsicle, and even then, you're only looking at a 12.5% cance of getting one with an eight egg clutch... and they won't be worth $3K then.. to be honest you can make blue eyed lucys with a long list of snakes that would cost a total of 700 and they sell for 2.5 k BEL's are selling for between $1200-$1500, butters, mojave, lessers are just a couple off the top of my head that can be breed to make supers. which in these cases are blue eyed luecys, 2 fires makes black eyed luecys. Ball pythons are great id you get multi morphs in one snake. thats where the money in them is GL "

"Hmm i would do as freebody suggested said in another thread and buy a pied ball and a pastel black as well. Then you can produce panda's and make thousands upon thousands with an initial outlay of $3200 "

A male pied is $2000 for a breedable IF you can find one. A female black pastel will run you $1000 if she's breeder sized.
Year One: You breed them, 50% of your clutch are het pieds, and 50% are black pastel het pieds, and that's IF she breeds.
Hopefully, you have 1.1 black pastel het pieds to breed together.
Year Four: The female is now three years old and ready to breed.
You pair the two BP het pieds.
You have a 1 in 8 chance or 12.5% chance of popping out a super black pastel pied.
In four years, a panda pied will be worth about $1500 because SO many people will have already produced them (myself included)
But what do you do? Remember, 12.5% chance of getting one. Keep it and breed it? Sell it and give away the project?
Ball python breeding is as large a mental game as it is anything else.

[percey39]

Originally Posted by mykee

In four years, a panda pied will be worth about $1500 because SO many people will have already produced them (myself included)
But what do you do? Remember, 12.5% chance of getting one. Keep it and breed it? Sell it and give away the project?
Ball python breeding is as large a mental game as it is anything else.

I understand this completely, but if you strike lucky and manage to get a male and female panda in the first 2 clutches ( after breeding the initial one ). Then you could still cash in on popular snake. I dont know the first thing about bp's but IF you managed to breed a panda pair would that not still be a $11,500 clutch right there!