Last year I put my pairs together and my vacation plans ended up getting moved ahead.
The result were clutches being laid while I was away with a less than knowledgable person looking after my collection. While she was able to maintain cleanliness and water many of the eggs laid were unnoticed and did not make it into the incubator soon enough to prevent loss. I ended up with an 80% loss overall.
That hurts when your talking about mandarins and the like.
The incubator settings wern't set right and some tex rats were hatched with kinks.

I want to time it better this year to have the females in the middle of gestation or better yet have the eggs tucked away in the incubator when I go. If laid I'd like to have them lay two - three weeks before I go, 30 days tops.
So I'm throwing out a request to you to give your opinons and observations as to how much time there is from mating to laying. What is average for american rat snakes (I'm a little foggy on that) and for mandarins. I'm trying to judge when to put them together.
What do you think?
Mike.

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