welcome to mft hawaii2nc! If you do some searching around the site (and in this livebearer forum) you should find the answers to most of those questions.
In a nutshell...the first time or two that your fish have babies it'll be hard to do any guessing, there's no way to know a lot of things about them. Usually they'll have a few (say 5-10) their first time, if you actually see her giving birth you'll see them fall every few seconds from the mother...but chances are good that you wont see it happening...and you wont know when its over. As for breeding nets/traps my personal preference is not to use them...I think it stresses the mother out too much and if you dont have another tank set up for fry or a plan in place for something to do with the fry, then you probably shouldn't be breeding anyway
