teddy bear breeding

Question
Our family has bought a Teddy bear hamster from a local pet store about 3-4 weeks ago.  She wasn't very large, and not very fat.  Well, we have noticed that when we took her out of the cage she was extremely active(thought it was just her).  Yesterday my children discovered that she has given birth to 5 babies.  Yikes!  The babies have hair, I don't think they can see well yet.  Only one is actually venturing out to the food dish and it isn't drinking from the water bottle.  When should I seperate them (I'm not wanting to breed again) and how many cages should I get and how do I tell what sexes they are?

Answer
It sounds like your mommy ham gave birth right around the time mine did, except I had planned my breeding. Your babies are likely around the 2 week mark if they have hair and are eating   pieces of food and venturing out. Another week to a week and a half and you can begin to separate them into sexed cages. Sexing babies is very very difficult since they do not have obvious external signs yet, but try to locate the anal and genital holes, the distance between them will be the best way to tell the sex. Here is a picture of what I mean: http://www.hamsterific.com/HamsterUniversity/images/SexingDiagramSyrian.jpg

Depending on how many you wish to keep or how many you can give away, each hamster will need it's own cage from 4-5 weeks old. From 3-5 weeks they can live in 2 different cages, one for males and one for females, simply because breeding can occur as early as 28 days, and we wouldn't want any more babies right now.

Here's a site with a good walk through of baby hamster life:

http://members.aol.com/honeybee4289/hamsterbabies.html