Snakebytes Blog

I hate to even promote this vid!

Although I hate to drive up the view count of this video. This is the B.S. that we are facing when it comes to public opinion. There is no doubt that there are problems with invasive species and we should all be trying our hardest to come up with sulutions for them. That being said when I see a video like this from www.defenders.org it makes my blood boil! This is what most people are seeing when it comes to our hobby. Is this the message that we want people to see??? We need to stand up and make our voices heard!

The Need To Breed

Originally I was going to spend all day at home working on my breeding schemes for Ball Pythons. It’s nice and quite, nobody interrupting me every five minutes. Then I realized that I had a few people coming by today and that’s the end of that pipe dream. What was I thinking that I could take a day without going to work??? Back to the topic of breeding, I finally finished rearranging all the adult Ball Pythons that are ready to breed, got all the males and females inventoried and now it’s a matter of figuring out what I want to put with what. I know it seems weird but I always get shocked when I see what I have on paper. During our normal work it just seems like a lot of cages with a lot of snakes. I guess I don’t think much about how much is actually there. Seeing this inventory on paper, I realize how many cool animals I have that are ready to breed this season. Coming off what I could consider a below average year of ball python breeding, I’m looking forward to hitting it out of the park this year. The one thing you can take out of a poor breeding season is that a lot of your females took the year off and are in great shape for the next breeding season. Between the females that didn’t produce and the new three year old females, we have a great group of incredible animals to breed, not to mention the two year first time breeder males that are ridiculous. There will be the chance for a lot of five and six bang combos this season. Of course now before we actually breed them it seems like we’ll be producing some of the most incredible animals we’ve ever had, the reality will set in some time during the breeding season that not every female will produce, not every male will breed. For now I’m happy to live in my little dream world, even if it’s only for a short time. No matter how things turn out I feel it’ll be a great year and I couldn’t be more excited to get things rolling!

New product

Anyone that breeds Ball Pythons on any level knows that they can get respiratory infections. Some people have little to no problems and others have a lot of problems. I’ll be honest and say we have some, but for the numbers we keep it’s not too out of control, annoying none the less. The standard treatment has been anti-biotic injections. We use Fortaz and Baytril once every three days for 10 treatments, that’s 30 days for those of you that can’t add:) We’ve had great success with it, but it takes a lot of time to weigh each animal, dose them and then finally treat them. The biggest thing that blows is if you’re in the middle of the breeding season and a male gets sick from stress, you pretty much lose that male for at least a month, if not the entire season. Now there is a new product out  that we’ll be trying for the first time here pretty soon. You mix it with sterile water and nebulizer them with a fogger. You fog them for 20 minutes a day for five to seven days and people are claiming that they get better like that??? Not only would this be awesome from the stand point that it will be so much easier, it’ll be a ton cheaper, and it could get the animals back in the breeding game in a week or two! Snakes have very long lungs and it’s hard for medication to get deep enough to get all the way to the bottom. If they are breathing this in for 20 minutes there’s a good chance that it will make it all the way to the bottom of their lungs. I’m not saying this is the cure to the plague, but I’m excited to see how this works out. I’ll keep everyone posted and you can be sure that I’ll be making a show about it’s success of failure. Of course this is not exclusive to Ball Pythons, it should work on all reptiles.  This has been my public announcement for the day:)

SnakeBytesTV-Zombie Snake!

By now you guys have to know that Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. That means we have to do a show that is nothing but spooky.lol If you like zombie snakes, guys turning into zombies, arms getting ripped off by a huge snake, and George dressing up in a little red riding hood outfit (WTF), then this is the show for you!

This show is meant for entertainment, watch with no intentions of learning anything, you will not be smarter when you’re finished, there’s even a chance that you will loose some of your intelligence???

Thanks for all the support! Brian(Sbtv) and the crew

What?? A Normal Day??

I thought I would never have a day like this again. That’s right, nobody visiting, no packing for a show, no filming for SnakeBytesTV, million other things that I’m thrust into. Does this mean I get to sleep in and watch the daily soap operas?? I would have to say, no! What it does mean is that I can get my huge list of things that I need to get done that always get put off started. I need to get my wholesale list for the pet shops done, need to get my list of animals to our sales rep done and to him, need to keep working on getting Ball Pythons and other Boids breeding, I need to take a ton of pictures and finish updating my website with Ball Pythons. Speaking of pictures, I need to share a little story. Last week Lori decided she needed to snap a few shots, mind you this is a Nikon D300, 60mm macro lens and sb600 speedlight. Total set up cost about $2500-$3000. Well you might have guessed it, the camera took a plunge and at first it seemed that only the $500 lens was smashed. After buying a new lens (which I was not happy about) we realized that there is damage to the actual camera body as well. I can take pics, but there is no auto focus and there are a few other things that are not just right. Lesson to be learned, never drop a really expensive camera! Back to work, today will be really nice, but in the past the days that seem to be smooth normally turn into the biggest nightmare. I have no doubt that jumping into all these over due projects will open Pandora’s box and I will be at work until super late tonight trying to get as much done as possible. You never know when the next free day will come your way. Kind of funny I would even call it a free day???

Halloween

For those of you that don’t know it, Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. We always do something really fun here at the shop to celebrate it. The last two years we’ve been able to dedicate a SnakeBytesTV episode to it. Here’s a look back on last years show. The reason I bring it up is because I had a chance to watch this weeks Halloween show this morning for the first time. Being that I’m so into this Holiday I thought it was a really good show. Ken our newest cameraman as well as one of the producers of the show came up with a couple great ideas. He even wrote a script for the main part of the show! Paul our editor did a great job of giving it that spooky feel. We’ll launch the show on our regular Wednesday morning schedule. I’m hoping that you guys will enjoy it for what it is, a bunch of snake freaks having a good time. We’re not looking for any Oscars or Nobble peace prizes. Maybe just a few laughs and hopefully a lot of people watching the show! Make sure to watch last years show to get you in the mood for this years rendition.

In need of help

I was thinking about all the “net” stuff I do and am involved in. I have a lot of help with most of it in one way or another. The truth is when I set out almost two years ago to kind of attack the net in a way that I felt had not been done by the reptile community. I had a vision, but no real idea how to get there. I have been learning as I go and picking up as much as I can from anywhere that I can. The first thing I started was our Myspace page, at the time only one or two reptile people had a profile. So I attacked as much as possible, trying to figure out how to grow our community without padding the numbers of friends that really had no interest in what we where into. I moved on to the SnakeBytesTV video part of my vision. I didn’t even own a camera, but I figured it out as I went along and guess I’m still figuring it out now.lol Of course since we’ve started all kinds of sites and got involved in as many social networking projects as we could. I might have been one of the first twitter guys in the hobby, not that I should be proud of that.lol No doubt the site I’m the most proud of is our www.snakebytestv.ning.com site. There is such an active membership there and I have so many great people that keep the site moving along as well as keep it as fresh as possible.

Now the help part of this blog. As I admitted I have been trying to figure out how to really take things to the next level with all our projects, but I have some limitations. Those limitations are I’m not sure of the best way to use all the tools I’m involved in. I tweet all the time, but I’m probably not using it the way it could be used to really expand our followers. I use facebook, but probably not to the best of it’s capabilities. And the list goes on and on. I’m guessing that a lot of you that read our blog and keep up with our projects have a much better understanding of certain social networks, kind of experts of one thing or another. I need your help to help me utilize these networks better then I am now. I’m not the smartest person in the world, but for the most part I pick up on things pretty quick. I just don’t have the time to sit and really dive into reading up on every way to help expand a community. I just feel like we have reached a size where someone that really understood the inside workings of youtube, or twitter, or facebook or whatever could really help me get things tied together better. We have a pretty big following on all these mediums, so now I want to not only give that following more of a reason to continue to follow, but also more of a reason to tell others about it and have them follow. Hope that makes sense. Remember this is about growing the reptile community, not growing my business. All our projects are about the hobby, never about an infomercial for BHB.  If you feel you can help me out on any of these things please let me know. I need your help!!! You can e-mail me at: bhb@comcast.net  Any and all help is welcomed! Huge thanks!