It happened to me!!!! I'm finally a victim of a mite infestation! AAARRRGGGHHH
I've owned reptiles for 15 years and have NEVER had a mite in my collection. Until now. It was just like one day I cleaned and nothing the next day little black specks, that moved! No Joke! So I had a mini panic attack and began to inspect every single snake to see how severe the infestation was/is. So far I could only see that two snakes had the little monsters. I snatched up my bottle of Reptile Relief (my first time ever using it for bugs) and began spraying like a woman possesed. Snakes, substrate, bins. Then the little light bulb above my head turned on......................"DAMNIT" I shouted! So I proceeded to dawn on my latex gloves, grab two buckets and the bleach. I filled the buckets with extremely hot water (hoping to boil the vermin to death) and the bleach and started to pull each water bowl out of each cage and drop them into the buckets. While I'm doing this I am laughing with sadistic glee as I see some little black bodies go floating down to the bottom of the bucket. Ah death! "Die spawn of satan" I shouted. Once the bowls were out I romoved each snake and doused them with RR and put them in a sterile empty container. I removed each bin one by one and dumped the substrate, cleaned the bin, put new substate back in and sprinkled my Mite Guard powder, stirred the substrate up, picked up the snake and put it back in the bin. Whether I saw bugs or not every snake got this treatment. I started at about 8 PM at night and didnt finish until about 2:30 AM. Out of 21 snakes only four had mites severely, and another two looked as though they were just starting to become infested. This all started on 7/20.
Saturday (7/29) I went to pick up some rodents and told my supplier of my trauma. She told me what their secret was. Liquid Ivory Soap! Looking at her a little funny I said "ok. I'll give it a shot. I've already run out of RR". She also told me go to VPI's website and check out their page on mites. So I went to Rite Aid and got the soap and the as soon as I arrived home I looked at VPI's mite page. After all I had to know what I was up against! Holy snakies!!!!! The soap remedey was there along with a plethora of information on the little beaties and how to destroy them. Feeling instantly empowered I got right to work. I came into the room and smugly annouced "Your all going to die! I hope it's a slow death to!"
The Ivory soap treatment worked!!!!! OMG!!!! The mites dropped of like...................well.......dying mites. I was elated. "ha ha ha Take that!" I shouted!
Today I am at the end of the first go round of soap treatments. The snakes that I started with are looking so much better!!! I actually haven't found a bug on em. Whew!!! I pray that I've caught the infestation early enought to keep it from spreading through my entire collection. My Retics and one ball python were the hardest hit. They are doing pretty good now and are wanting to eat!! Yay!
Anyway! Thanks for listening! If your having a mite problem or are now paranoid (sorry) check out VPI's website and learn about mites. There's a lot of great info there.
Thank you so much to Ginger for giving me the VPI information and thank you so much VPI for putting that on your site. As the mite war continues in my house I'm just grateful for this tool and that all the casualties are on the enemies side.
Thanks again.
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Christine
Tails With Scales Reptiles
Happiness is biting my snake back!
