I just wanted to post a comparison shot of some NERD line and Barnhart line black pastels that I've hatched out.  As you can see the Barnhart line is brighter and more orange, while the NERD line animals I'm working with are just plain dark!  The Barnhart line black pastels seem to make some extreme combos, like my breeder male black pastel yellowbelly!

The next picture is just a little comparison shot between the two Barnhart line black pastel yellowbellies that I've produced this year.  On the left is a male that just had his first meal, and on the right is a female that's about two months old but took a month to start eating.  You can see that while she hasn't put on a lot of size, the orange is really starting to come in.

First clutch is finished hatching!  Ended up with 0.1 black pastel yellowbelly, 1.0 black pastel, 1.2 yellowbellies, and 2.0 normals.  Not too shabby, and I've got my first holdback for the year!

Clutch number 3 for this year was just laid by our smallest breeding girl, who also happens to be the first girl we purchased.  She's one of those girls who ate fine but just never grew into a big snake.  Since breeding her (and getting eggs!) for the first time last year she's actually started growing a little bit more, this year she weighs just over 1000 grams after laying.  She was paired with the kingpin mainly, but near the end I started throwing the black pastel yellowbelly in with her also, so there's potential for a good mix of morphs to be hatching out of these six eggs.

I also just realized today that our pinstripe girl snuck an ovulation by me!  I don't really have any sort of set schedule for palpating, so it had been a while since I checked her out.  She just shed this past weekend and I noticed she was hugging the back wall where the heat is in my adult racks.  So I pulled her out and palpated her, and sure enough she's got eight or nine eggs her!  I'll be looking forward to that clutch, she was bred to both our vanilla and our orange dream males.

And as usual, our girl Ashe is the one laying it!  Hoping for some black pastel yellowbellies out of these seven pearly whites!  Check out the clutch info here.

Found our first ovulation of 2012 tonight!  Looking forward to this clutch... this girl has consistantly produced great looking babies, and had 7 or 8 follicles in her when I palpated.  She was bred to our Tom Barnhart produced black pastel yellowbelly, hopefully I can hit a couple of combos in this clutch!

I think this triple gene combo is going to be one of those that is either smoking hot or just kind of meh.  She should be ovulating in the next week or two here, and hopefully we get a good clutch out of her this year!  Last year she gave us two good eggs and nine slugs.  I'm hoping that since she'll be ovulating before the heat really hits here we won't get any slugs this time.

but I'll take it!  I'm not sure if he successfully locked or not, but at least I've got visual confirmation that he's trying...

I've been drooling over this combo since 2008 and finally managed to pick one up!  This little guy was just dropped off yesterday and he already took a rat pup tonight.  Can't wait to get some size on him!  

Hit the picture to see more!