So you’ve chosen your lucky couple. You’ve followed all the guidelines. The mother and father are at a healthy mating age, you’ve researched the family history, and you’ve laid out all the other preliminary groundwork for dwarf hamster breeding. So now that you’ve chosen the perfect couple, the perfect parents to be of a new litter of baby hamsters, what’s next?
The next step is introducing them. When you do this, you need to be careful how you go about things. Dwarf hamsters, the darling little things they are, do have some territorial issues. And when you’re breeding them, you’re going to need to respect them (even if you don’t understand them!). Also, if you’ve been keeping the boys and girls separated it will be their first meeting (yes, a blind date!) and we all know what blind dates do to our nerves.
When choreographing the meeting, you can take the female and place her in the male’s cage. Or you can place the couple together on some neutral territory. But don’t place the male in the female’s cage. If things go smoothly, your couple will take it from there. They’ll sniff each other and the entire mating dance will take some time. You’ll notice (if you must watch!) the female freezes in a distinctive position with her tail in the air.
Unfortunately dwarf hamster breeding doesn’t always go smoothly. If the male hamster hasn’t mated before, he may get a little confused at this point. They won’t know exactly what side to approach their potential mate from. The male will figure it out, even if his first several attempts fail and frustrate the waiting female. Curiously, a “virgin” female is much less tolerant of a “virgin” male than a female who has mated prior to this. If the female is not receptive, then one of the two hamsters should be removed from the cage. And you’ll know if the female isn’t receptive, because they’ll probably end up in a serious scuffle. If things don’t go well at first, the female was probably just not be in the mood and with the proper follow up techniques you’ll still have a dwarf hamster family in no time.
Matchmaking may be an important step in dwarf hamster breeding, but it is just the beginning. After mating you still have a few roles to play including marriage counselor and maybe even divorce attorney.
