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I'm using vermiculite & water for the eggs. I also have a small dish of water in the container w/the eggs. I'm using a hovabater incubator that has been modified with a fish styro to make it a lot deeper than the chicken egg hovabator. They're in a closed Sterilite container with two tiny holes drilled in the lid. Humidity is around 80% and has been up to 90% a couple of times. I have a digital thermometer that saves the high and low temps of the day. Temperature fluctuates from 82° to 86°.
Last friday I came home from work and checked my high/low temps and it had gotten down to 68° at some point during the day. I'm guessing the electric had been off for most of the day. All clocks flashing, etc. Of course it was around 10° outside all day! Then today I noticed a couple of the eggs weren't as plump as they had been. Also I could only separate 3 eggs, the rest are in a mass. It's the top two eggs in the mass that are dented. I was thinking maybe not enough humidity.
As for brumation, here's what happened:
I have a friend who is having a house built. He had his mobile home up for sale. He never in a million years thought he'd sell that mobile home the same week he listed it. So he had to move ASAP and his house won't be done until at least April or May 2005. He moves in w/a friend, a nonsnake loving friend I may add. So he asks me if I will babysit his snakes. This was in September 2004. He brings all his snakes over, 3 EDBs, 1 WDB, a dusky pigmy, 1.1 greybands, 1 Texas ratsnake, 1 prairie king and 3 red milks. I do nothing with the venomous, I don't even open their cages for any reasion. He maintains them. All these animals are in a back room which is barely heated.
Until it got cold, he was coming weekly to check on and feed/clean everything. When it got cold, around the end of October, he stopped coming over. On a 50° day the room will get around 70°. However it normally stays from 50-60°. It's never gotten below 50°. I pulled all the nonvenomous snakes out of the room in early December. I felt sorry for them because they hadn't eaten in several months. He keeps his M&F greybands together so I did that too. I feed them separately. The day after Christmas is the first time I noticed them breeding. Then they bred off and on for about two weeks and then I removed the male. The female ate like a pig and got fatter & fatter and she laid her eggs on February 15. A total of 11.
I think she is going to double clutch. After she laid her eggs, she didn't really lose that much weight, just looked like she did before she was gravid. So I decided to see if she would double clutch. I believe she is going to. They bred and bred over the weekend and Monday bred for 3 hours straight. I removed him yesterday.
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