Do you enjoy asking the questions that have no easy answers?

Temps all depend on which milk you decide to get but for all of them 100 degrees is too much... some milks such as Black Milks or Andeans would even find your background temps of 77-80 a little too much. Your night time low is acceptable for all IMO especially since you do offer a warm spot with the under tank heaters should they choose to seek it out.

Definative answers for the best temps for a given milk snake subspecies are hard to come by here. What I've done for the few milk species I have is use the web site I've included a link to below. There's a menu along the left hand side that is fairly self explanatory. From the "World" menu pick Central America... depending on which country you pick you'll have the option of choosing among several cities... useful if you have locality data on the milk snake you're thinking about... along the top are the usual tabs... the one you want to look at is the climate tab... it has a drop down menu... choose graphs... if I've explained all this correctly you should now be looking at a graph with the average high and low temps for that area... off on the right hand side you should be seeing options to view items such as the forecast, Current weather etc. All that information should give you a good idea on where to start for temperatures for any given milk.

As long as you're not planning on breeding these milk snakes I'd keep things within the average range for highs and lows. From there observe the milks behaviour... does it spend most of it's time in the high end range you've provided or at the low range... tweek the temperatures accordingly.

Knowing the snakes you're looking at I'd say go with the hondo's or polyzona's as both would do well in the temperature range you keep your apartment at. I have both those species, both have been offered hides in areas from the mid 70's to mid 80's... over time both have seemed to prefer temps in the high 70's.

Gerry
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