BUYING ROYAL MORPHS AND HETS FOR BREEDING

1). Price isn't everything, quality is more desireable. Buy the best you can afford!!! Weight is extremely important because initial saving by buying the cheapest, which is often the smallest, can lead to waiting an extra year for your royal to breed. In a year, the type of morph you are breeding may drop in value by £150.00 each, for example, you will recieve £450.00 less and have fed your royal for an extra year as well. Thus buying cheap and small can be a false economy but obviously you can only buy what you can afford. Do not buy a royal that looks skinny because the chances are that it is either a poor feeder or a poor grower. The one thing that I have found extremely frustrating is slow growth in some or all of our morphs which, in one case has led to a two year delay in successful breeding.

2). Beware of giving deposits on royals that are not already in the U.K. Cites documents can take 6-10 months for USA exporters to the UK to obtain. It is likely that a USA breeder is going to feed and house the royals that were ordered for that length of time? Let's say that you order a July2006 hatched 250gram morph in November2006 and the export documants take 10 months to obtain which means August/September 2007. Another batch of your morph will have hatched by then. Will you get the 2006 morph or a 2007 morph? Over a 10 month period, the price of your type of morph will almost certainly have dropped and so you may end up paying 2006 prices on a 2007 morph which will be very small. Just as an example, I have a group of morphs on order in the USA which were origionally due Jan/Feb 2007 but now I cant be sure when they will arrive because there is now only one office handling Cites export documents in the USA. Will I get the actual snakes that I ordered if the shipment is delayed another 4-6 months?? If I had taken deposits on these morphs from customers, would they be happy? I dont think so.

3). Purchase some ordinary female royals because your males can mate with several in one season and, if you have dominant or co-dominant male morphs, you will be able to produce more hatchlings. Again, try and purchase females that will reach breeding size at the same time as your male morphs.

4). Some Double hets can give your results a boost compared to single hets. An example are the Double het for snows that we currently are offering for sale. Bred together these can produce Albino, Axanthic and Snow morphs from one clutch. What you actually get in one clutch is in the lap of the gods obviously but if you produce a Snow morph, you will be laughing all the way to the bank. Multi morph producing royals will be the route i will be following in the future.