All right, mrs. Wilson is
Partially in her lay box. So we're going to check
And see if there are any eggs to be found
It would be a little early because she shed only like three days ago
And usually they shed which is called their pre lay shed about
Seven to ten days before they lay the eggs. So, let's see
Nothing yet. All right, we'll check back later
Any eggs from mrs. Wilson today? Oh no not with that fat belly
Hello?
Hello Cheyenne, how about tonight?
Your head is poking out. Does that mean anything I
Don't see anything yet, but she has been digging around quite a bit
So I'm gonna have to check 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 have you're just psyching me out last night, weren't you? All right
How about tonight? Oh
Wow, you've been busy renovating inside there haven't you? That could be a good sign
All right, let's see. Mrs. Wilson the legless lizards and I wish that you start laying your eggs
And you just have barricaded yourself oh oh
Is that what I think it is?
It sure is all right, I will leave you alone I
Don't want to bug you
well, it's been about
six hours since she started maybe even a little bit longer so she very
Well could be done at this point
Holy cow. Oh
My gosh, do you still have some in ya too? - yeah guys. She is still layin I think well
One two three four five six eight nine ten eleven eggs so far
Well, you know, I was planning on putting the eggs in here for incubation. Assuming she was done
But I don't want to interrupt her because if you do that
Then sometimes the snake will get spooked and stop laying and when they start again, they become egg bound. So we are
Going to continue leaving her alone, I guess
Let's see what's going on in here
by the way
her lay box is simply just a black cave that's flipped upside down with a
Piece of corrugated plastic just cut to size and attached with these little paper clips
It works really well, and it's a nice cheap
Lay box that also doubles as a hide afterwards. You ready for this? Oh-ho, man. I'm so excited
What of we got? Oh
You're still laying
All right. How many do you have left? It looks like you might have two left. How many do you have here?
One two three, I see 19 so far Jesus. All right
Well, since you still have a couple I thought I don't want to bug you
So I guess I'll just leave you alone a little bit longer
It's the following morning so I think
She should be done. Maybe. Hi cutie. I know you're so adorable. Just poking a little head out. What have we got going? Ah
Man, you still have one right here. And there's one over here. That's a little squish looking
So this is kind of why I wanted to take them out last night, but here I also didn't want to stress her out
Take a quick look here
And we've got tons of little eggs, but if you look at this, she still has one in there
But it has been quite a while so she's probably going to need some help in getting that one out. Hmm
This is gonna be interesting
well
First what I'm going to do is I'm going to remove these eggs just to get them out of here, get them in
Incubation and then we will figure out what to do with her remaining eggs here
And by the way in the wild bull snakes will lay their eggs and they'll leave them. They won't stay with them
She's just in here because it's nice and warm so she will not be missing these eggs at all
and she's also probably still in here because she still has a couple eggs that we're gonna take care of later here and what we're
going to do is I'm going to
Make little divots inside of this perlite
For each of the eggs so I can just plop them right on in
And we actually did an experiments with perlite versus
vermiculite and you can use because people will use either one of these incubation materials and
the experiment we did last year was with a different bull snake of ours where we split up per clutch between
The perlite and vermiculite to see if there would be any different hatch rates between the two and the results showed us
It's actually this video right here- and the results showed us that you can use either one
But we tend to prefer the perlite because it makes a slightly less mess than the vermiculite does
it's also convenient because once the babies hatch the
Shell can be rinsed off a little bit easier from the perlite than the vermiculite and I like to give people
Shells when I go do their birthday party or if somebody buys a snake I'll usually try to give them the egg shell
That came with the snake before I take these eggs out. I'm going to mark their vertical most points so that if they happen to
Move in my hands. I can still maintain the orientation by 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 these out
Let's set them in and I'm also going to have to peel apart these eggs
Because they are stuck together by an adhesive that is created by the snake. So we're just going to slowly
peel these apart 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
First off by being stuck together like this
The eggs are more likely to maintain that original orientation and less likely to roll around since they're all stuck together
Second if part of the clutch is warm and part of the clutch is cool
The heat will actually transfer through the eggs where they attach to the other side and it will stabilise their overall incubation temperature
I could keep them together like this if I wanted
But from what I've read and from what I've heard you have a slightly better hatch rate if you do split them up that way
Everything can stay as uniform as possible during incubation
Well, this group of eggs may be stuck a little bit too well together for me to pull apart
So I think I am going to leave this clump together. Actually, we're just going to set them right in incubation
There's stuck so well, I don't want to risk ripping anything by pulling them apart
So, yeah, I guess I'll make an exception and all I'll just leave these together. This is a tiny little egg. Look at that. Ah
And here the squished one. Here we have what is called a slug in the reptile world.
This is an infertile egg and you can tell it's infertile because compared to a healthy fertile egg, it's darker in color
It's pretty yellow. It's also smaller and it's squishy. Usually they're not this squishy
Usually they're pretty well inflated, but they have pointed ends
But this one's just a really unique slug, I guess but regardless it's not fertile
It's not going to hatch so we are going to probably just feed it to my alligator to be honest. In the meantime
We don't want to be ignoring these eggs, so I'm going to write down
The date that they were laid, and we're going to put them in incubation
To incubate these eggs. I'm going to place them in our handy-dandy green tree python room since it's heated
We actually have a pair of bee ox together right now, but it looks like he's pouting
He doesn't really appreciate having a girlfriend. Anyway, we're going to take our a heat gun
that's 87 you want the eggs to be incubated in the mid-80s and
There's risk incubating too hot rather more risk incubating too hot than too cold. So I think I'm gonna try to keep them at
83 82 I think that'll work. Yeah, we're just fine. So we're going to set them right on top of this EXO Tara I guess
Close it completely
And our eggs are all set
Well after about 24 hours being stuck with those last three eggs
near her vents, we decided
that we had to go in there and we had to assist her
in laying those eggs
there's a short time frame or a short period where eggs will actually die inside mother if they're not laid within that time frame and
We're kind of cutting our losses for the eggs
But we had to save mom and make sure that she was safe and she was okay. We're pretty sure that she just
expelled all of her energy on the first
22 eggs 23 if you include the slug and she had no energy left for the last three eggs
Huh, so we had to go in and Ed and I together. We're able to
Took a little while, but we got the last three eggs out. Here's two over the three one of them
We got out yesterday and we thought maybe she'd be able to get the last two out after that
But she would did not so we went in today. We were able to get these two out one of them popped
So she's actually over there and betadine bath to flush everything out in her vent area
And this one we might just I mean we might incubate just for kicks and giggles. We'll see what ends up happening
Anyway, what came in most handy was a three mil syringe and a feeding needle. This is not an actual needle. It's hollow
it's used to feed our egg-eating snake babies actually and what we did was we
extracted some mineral oil from here and inserted through the vent into the
area where the eggs were sitting to try to lube them up a little bit and
We were hoping that it would create kind of like as my friend Chad
So nicely puts it a slip and slide on the way out, but unfortunately that didn't work
She still wasn't able to do it on her own
so then we went in and we used some other tools and we actually use this to kind of help maneuver them out and eventually
We got them out thankfully
So the moral of the story is if you are going to breed snakes or you're currently breeding snakes
Make sure you have on hand because these were our life savers have mineral oil which you can buy at any pharmacy
Have a syringe at 1 mil or 3 mil
If you need to if you have a bigger snake and most importantly have a feeding needle
This is a 16-gauge feeding needle that we got from a squirrel
Rehabilitator and I'll put a link to where to buy it in the comments
These were fantastic to have on hand and I don't know what we would have done if we did not have these because our vet
Was closed by the time that we realized she needed help and it was a Saturday night
So they were gonna be closed the next day as well. So we were kind of on our own but we did it
Thanks to your help. Thank you Ed
What can I say? but we need to stay positive
Despite all that hassle. And this was the most hectic bull snake or any snake laying
experience ever
Despite a lot. We need to focus on the positive
We have 22 awesome looking eggs that are fertile and we're gonna try this one. We'll see what happens
I doubt anything's gonna happen
So we're gonna say we have 22 eggs
And we're really looking forward to seeing them hatch because there's a huge variety of morphs that they could be
What's all the morphs they can be? They could be
With dad being a hypo albino het Whiteside and xanthic and mom being a triple het exanthic white-sided albino
we could get a huge combination of the two we could get
Albinos, Whitesides xanthics, then we could get snows we could get Whitesided snows or white sided xanthics or white
sided albinos
Everything will be het hypo because dad and at least het 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
We'll do a live egg cutting but that will be around 55 days from now at today's the fifth So oh
man
mid June
Anyway, we will be keeping you updated on the YouTube community page the Twitter account and the Facebook page to let you all know in
The egg start hatching so that you can join us during that life and cutting that would be like Christmas in June
I can't wait. We'll see you then. Uh
Hello, I didn't even know you were gravid I didn't think it took I guess we have more eggs
And we have one final bull snake clutch from Brad. Good job mama
There's the second half we are going to be up to our ears in bull snakes in six weeks
It looks really orange right here
Here Rex take care of this
Well, he caught it oh now you realize you have it
No I'm not feeding you anymore!