Hi Chris,



Thanks for your question!



To be perfectly honest, there's no real recipe or complexity about what I do in regards to not brumating my snakes.



I normally would keep my snakes in the garage during the fall/winter months for brumating as that was the coldest place I could keep that also seemed fairly stable in temperature and stayed dark for the most part. But the last handful of years we've been doing some remodeling and my garage hasn't been a good place to keep them due to the activity of me working in there and all of the sawdust. Plus, the garage was always a place that I had to monitor as it only maintained a temperature 10-15 degrees above the outside temps, so if there was a cold snap that got into the low 20s or below, then I'd have to either bring the snakes out of brumation early or try to find another cool place to shuffle them off too. I started looking at coolers and other such stable appliances to use in place of the garage but I just never got that far (yet).



So, over the last several years, I would sometimes pair up some snakes during the fall/winter months that I had no luck with breeding during the summer and wasn't brumating and had some success with them, so the last winter season of 2011 I thought I'd ditch the whole brumation attempt and see how I'd do and to my surprise, 2011/2012 was my most successful breeding season to date with more and larger clutches as well as several double clutches; in total, I hatched out 10 clutches out of 13 laid during 2012. Seven clutches in 2012 were laid between January to March and hatched out in March-May and the last 6 clutches were laid October-December with 3 hatching out last month in December, 2 this month in January and the final lucky 13th clutch expected in February. So by the middle of February, I'll have already hatched out 3 clutches for 2013. If you notice, no hatchings occurred during the late spring or summer months of 2012.



With all of that said, choosing to not brumate is an enduring and costly choice considering the sizeable collection I maintain as I have to do all of the normal maintenance throughout the year which of course means having to feed on a regular basis and even though I breed several colonies of mice to help offset my expenses, I used to be able to build up my food stock for the snakes in the winter months when I'd brumate them so I'd have more than adequate enough supplies during the active months, now I'm having to purchase more frozen mice from 3rd party suppliers to ensure that I have enough mice to feed to my collection. So there is that to consider.



Obviously there is a lot of conjecture back and forth about the pros and cons of brumating and especially the reasons why a person might choose to do it or not. All I know is that I've had a lot more success these last couple of seasons by not brumating my collection than I had when I did. That's not to say that I'm still not considering getting a cooler appliance of some sort to see if there might be a more effective and safer way for me to brumate my collection just to see whether it might make a difference versus my old school garage way of brumating which was haphazard at best. Either way, I'm not ruling out the positive effects that some claim brumating their collection might have, I just know it's not seemed necessary for me so far to do so to be successful in breeding and/or maintaining my collection.
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Troy Rexroth

Rextiles

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