Our mice

We have had our mice for some time now and has learned more about them in terms of their behaviour, what they like to eat, how they are socially towards each other etc. They will almost anything but they also have their favorite type of food. One of the favorites is actually cheese! I (Carli) thought that this was just old wifes tail but if I put chesse in the food bowl, it is the first they will eat:-) Another thing is a typoe of cracker we have here in DK called Marie kiks, but they also like other types of crackers. We have also given them tomatoes, mushrooms, broccoli, apples and anything else we have had as leftovers from our house. But their basic food is socorps, which is a type of food other breeders of mice import to their mice and we just buy it from them. They are also given a small portion of mixed corn each day together with oatmeal and once a week they are given worms that we buy in the petstore, because they need to have meat once in a while to supplement their diet. If we have any leftovers that we think the mice will eat we give them that too. The latest we have tried to give them is something called black oat which has a higher level of fat than the normal oat and this is something the mice really appriciate:-)

Because we have expanded the amount of mice cages we have changed the way the shelfs in the cat house is build, that way it's  much easier to handle and feed the mice each day. For now we have 11 cages with mice in 10 of them but we might expand in the future. In order to keep a record of which mice is living in each cage, we have given each cage a number and have also made notes as to where offsprings from the other cages has moved to because we don't want to experinece inbreeding in the future. As it can be seen on the pictures Ida is VERY interested in the mice:-)

Here half of the shelves can be seen

View from one end of the room, looking down to the part where the cats are during the day. In the fridge on the left we store the day old chicks the cats are given every day as a treat:-)

Looking at the shelves from the door

One of the newer cages where we have a red male (seen in the tube) from our own breeding, as well as 2 female mice from my friend, Susanne's, breeding and 2 light coloured female mice from our own breeding, but from another breeding pair than where the red male comes from

One of the biggest cages. In each cage there is 1 male and 3 - 4 females


Our breeding mice consist of silk and clown mice:-)


Clown mice
 

Clown mice

Clown mice

Longhaired mice
 

Light coloured female
 

Red male and light coloured female, app. 1 month old in these pictures
 

Young baby mice who are only a few days old (also known as pinkies) together with a older baby mice
 
 

As a rule all the females in one cage will contribute to the upbringing of all the babies together and also older baby mice will help raise the younger ones. The male will also help raising the babies if he's allowed to but that's not always the case