Incubating Bullsnake Eggs- My Worst Experience Ever

Very good, mrs. Wilson is partially in his rest box. So let's check and see if there are

eggs

. It would be a little early because she just got dumped three days ago. And usually they shed, what's called their pre-lay shed, about seven to ten days before lay. the

eggs

. So let's look at Nothing yet. Okay, we'll check back later. Some egg from mrs. Wilson today? Oh not with that fat belly, no. Hello? Hi Cheyenne, how was tonight? Your head is poking out. Does that mean anything? I don't see anything yet, but she's been doing quite a bit of research.

So I'll have to check it in the morning, but I'll leave you alone for now. Good luck. Alright, it's the next morning. Have you laid eggs? You're still fat. I don't think you did. You were just getting on my nerves last night, weren't you? Very good, how was tonight? Oh wow, you've been busy renovating the interior, haven't you? That could be a good sign. Okay, let's see. Mrs. Wilson the legless lizards and I wish you would start laying your eggs And you've just dug in oh oh Is that what I think it is? I'm sure it's okay, I'll leave you alone.

I don't want to bother you, it's been about six hours since it started, maybe even a little more, so it could very well end at this point. Holy Cow. Oh my god, do you still have something inside too? - Yes guys. She's still laying, I think fine. One, two, three, four, five, six, eight, nine, ten, eleven eggs so far. Well, you know, she was planning to put the eggs here to hatch them. Assuming it's done, but I don't want to interrupt it because if you do that, sometimes the snake gets scared and stops laying eggs and when it starts again, it gets stuck in eggs.

So let's just continue leaving her alone, I guess. Let's see what's going on here, by the way her resting box is just a black cave that's turned upside down with a piece of corrugated plastic freshly cut to size and held together with these little guys. clips Works great, and is a nice cheap Lay box that also doubles as a hiding place later. Are you ready for this? Oh ho, man. I'm so excited. What about what we have? Oh, you're still lying down. Alright. How many do you have left? Looks like you have two left. How many do you have here?

One two three, I see 19 so far Jesus. Very good Well, since you still have a partner I thought I didn't want to bother you. So I guess I'll leave you alone for a little longer. It's the next morning, so I think I should be done. Maybe. Hi beautiful. I know you are so adorable. Just peeking out a little head. What do we have going on? Ah man, you still have one here. And there's one over here. It looks a little soft. So that's why I wanted to take them out last night, but I didn't want to stress her out here either.

Take a quick look here. And we have tons of little eggs, but if you look at this, she still has one there, but it's been a while, so she'll probably need help getting it out. Hmm, this is going to be interesting. First, what I'm going to do is remove these eggs just to get them out of here, put them into incubation and then we'll figure out what to do with the remaining eggs here. And by the way in the wild bull snakes will lay their eggs and leave them. They won't stay with them. She's only here because she's nice and warm, so she won't be missing these eggs at all and she's probably here too because she still has a couple of eggs that we'll deal with later here. and what we are going to do is make small holes inside this bead for each of the eggs so we can place them directly.

And we actually did experiments with perlite versus vermiculite and you can use because people will use any of these incubation materials and the experiment we did last year was with a different

bullsnake

of ours where we divided by clutch between perlite and vermiculite to see if there would be different hatching rates between the two and the other. The results showed us Actually, it's this video right here, and the results showed us that you can use either one. But we tend to prefer perlite because it's a little less messy than vermiculite and it's also convenient because once the babies are born, the shell can be rinsed a little easier with perlite than vermiculite and I like to give people shells. when I go to their birthday party or if someone buys a snake, I usually try to give them the eggshell that came with the snake before.

I take out these eggs. I'm going to mark their most vertical points so that if it happens, they will move in my hands. I can still maintain orientation knowing which side goes up basically after the first 24 hours. The embryo will attach to the side of the egg and after that point you don't want to rotate the egg or the embryo could drown in its own fluids. . So we're going to take them out, we're going to place them and I'm also going to have to peel these eggs because they are stuck together by an adhesive created by the snake.

So let's slowly peel them off and place them in their incubation trays. Now the reason the eggs are stuck together and there's actually an adhesive here is there's actually a couple of reasons why they're stuck together like this in the first place. They are more likely to maintain that original orientation and less likely to roll since they are all stuck together. Second, if part of the clutch is warm and part of the clutch is cold, the heat will actually transfer through the eggs where they attach to each other. side and will stabilize your overall incubation temperature.

I could keep them together like this if I wanted to. But from what I've read and what I've heard, you have a slightly better hatching rate if you split them that way. Everything can stay as uniform as possible during incubation. Well, this group of eggs may be too close together for me to separate them. So I think I'm going to leave this group together. Actually, we're just going to leave them incubation. They are stuck together so well that I don't want to risk breaking anything by separating them. So, yeah, I guess I'll make an exception and leave it all alone. these together.

This is a small egg. Check it out. Oh and here is the crushed one. Here we have what in the reptile world is called a slug. This is an infertile egg and you can tell it is infertile because compared to a healthy fertile egg it is darker in color. It's quite yellow. It is also smaller and softer. They are generally not that soft. They are usually fairly well inflated, but have pointed ends. But this is a really unique slug I guess, but it's not fertile anyway. She's not going to hatch, so we'll probably just feed her. to my alligator to be honest.

In the meantime, we don't want to ignore these eggs, so I'll write down the date they were laid and we'll put them into incubation to hatch these eggs. I'm going to put them in our practical and stylish green python room since it's heated. We actually have a pair of bee oxen together right now, but he looks like he's pouting. He really doesn't like having a girlfriend. Anyway, we're going to take a heat gun of 87. If you want the eggs to hatch in the mid-80s, there's a risk of hatching too hot and more risk of hatching too hot than too cold.

So I think I'll try to keep them at 83 82. I think that will work. We are ok. So let's place them right on top of Tara EXO, I guess we'll close it completely and our eggs will be ready. Well, after about 24 hours of being stuck with those last three eggs near their vents, we decided we had to go inside. there and we had to help her lay those eggs. There is a short period of time or a short period in which the eggs will actually die inside the mother if they are not laid within that period of time and we are reducing our losses for the eggs.

But we had to save mom and make sure she was safe and well. We're pretty sure she just expelled all the energy from her in the first 22 eggs (23 if you include the slug) and she had no energy left for the last three eggs. Uh, so we had to go in and Ed and I together. We were able to do it. It took us a little while, but we got the last three eggs out. Here are two of the three. One of them. We went out yesterday and thought maybe she could take out the final two after that.

But she didn't, so we went in today. We were able to get these two out, one of them exploded. So she's there and takes a betadine bath to get rid of

ever

ything in her venting area. And this one we could just, I mean, we could hatch it just for fun and laughs. We'll see what ends up happening. Anyway, what I found most useful was a three thousand syringe and a feeding needle. This is not a real needle. It's hollow, it's actually used to feed our baby snakes that eat eggs and what we did was we extracted some mineral oil from here and we inserted it through the vent into the area where the eggs were to try to lubricate them a little bit and hoping it would create something similar to what my friend Chad did.

He so kindly slides it in and out, but unfortunately that didn't work. She still couldn't do it herself so we went in and used some other tools and actually used this to help us maneuver to get them out and eventually we got them out thankfully. So the moral of the story is that if you are going to raise snakes or if you are currently raising snakes, make sure you have them on. hand because these were our life savers they have mineral oil that you can buy at any pharmacy Have a 1 mil or 3 mil syringe If necessary if you have a larger snake and most importantly you have a feeding needle This is a 16 gauge feeding needle which we got from a squirrel rehabilitator and I'll put a link to where to buy it in the comments.

It was great to have them on hand and I don't know what we would have done if we didn't have them because our vet was closed when we realized he needed help and it was Saturday night so they would be closed the next day too. So we were alone but we made it thanks to your help. Thanks Ed What can I say? but we must maintain a positive attitude despite all these inconveniences. And this was the most eventful bull snake placement

experience

ever

, despite many things. We need to focus on the positive. We have 22 amazing looking eggs that are fertile and we are going to try this one.

We'll see what happens. I doubt anything is going to happen. So we will say that we have 22 eggs. And we really want to see them hatch because there is a wide variety of transformations they could have. What are all the transformations they can have? ? They could be: With dad being a white sided hypoalbino het Whiteside and xanthic and mom being a white sided triple het exanthic albino, we could get a great combination of the two, we could get Albinos, Whitesides xanthics, then we could get snows, we could get Whitesides. snows or white-sided xanthics or white-sided albinos Everything will be hypo because dad and at least it's Albino because dad is hypo and albino I can't wait for this clutch to hatch when they start hatching.

I will let you know that we will do a live egg cut, but that will be 55 days from today, the fifth. So, in mid-June, anyway, we will keep you updated on the YouTube community page, Twitter account and Facebook. page to let everyone know that the egg is starting to hatch so they can join us for that lifetime and cutting that would be like Christmas in June. I can not wait. See you then. Hello, I didn't even know you were pregnant. I didn't think it was necessary. I guess we have more eggs. And we have one last clutch of Brad's

bullsnake

.

Good job mom. There is the second half. We'll be up to our ears in bullsnakes in six weeks. It looks very orange here. Here, Rex, take care of this. Well you got it, oh now you realize you got it. No, I'm I'm not feeding you anymore!