Okay thankyou I just have heard mixed answers about how the coloration of apricot offspring works, some said they act like hets so you can breed them and get apricot colored offspring, and others have said they are just normals.
Okay, let me clarify this better for you. Yes, "apricot" is basically a color morph, but it is simply a normal line-bred color phase that started showing up in them in the early to mid 1990's. The white and yellow inner triad rings are a more typical coloration. This is VERY similar to tangerine Hondurans and tricolor Hondurans, both are normal color phases but not a recessive trait either. You can get both types and anything in between depending on what you breed it to and what THEIR parental lineages consisted of. The different color phases are
not a recessive (heterozygous) trait and will be one type or the other, with gene carriers that are 100% "het" for apricot.
The reason you get mixed colors is because they have mixed lineages of either types of color phase. If you breed a very orange apricot to another very orange apricot, and the past parental lineages of those parents were all from apricots, your chances of producing apricots will be much greater, and vise-versa as well. There was some more recent normal, lighter colored animals involved with your parental stock, so that is why you are getting somewhat more of a mixed phenotype clutch there. It's the exact same thing with tangerine Hondurans and tricolor Hondurans, apricot Mexican milks, etc.... in other words, you wont label the tricolors you produce as "het" for apricot, but it would be accurate to mention them being "
from apricot lineage".
Anyway, your apricots are a color phase "morph", and not a recessive morph.
Hope this helps some.........
And all of yours are very nice looking as well. I am guessing they came from some pretty "clean" parents that didn't have a whole bunch of dark pigment (melanin) in their inner light rings known in the hobby as "newsprint". Instead of very distinct dark scale tipping (as with many Latin milksnake subspecies), Pueblan's and many other North American milks get a sort of "over-spray" look in their light rings like they were lightly sprayed with a paint can of dark paint. This is very typical of older Pueblans as they mature.
cheers, ~Doug