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Here is the rack we built in an
afternoon using Clay
Davenports instructions from
arbreptiles.com

Mandy helped A LOT showing
how easy his instructions are to
follow.

We say "ranch" because we are not sure whether we will want to breed
our snakes. There is a lot to think about.
Can we take care of them when they are born?
Will our mom go crazy with all of those snakes around?
Can we find good homes for them?

We will decide these things as we go along... and keep you posted.

Feeding our snakes live or frozen/thawed

When we got our first couple of snakes, we fed them live pinkies. We
found them at a local pet store and that worked well. But at $1.50 or
more a feeding, this quickly added up once we hit 10 snakes. Then we
found Mice on Ice being sold in a 6 pack that came out to about $1 a
feeding. This became expensive as well, especially once we hit 30
snakes. After doing some research, we found some websites that mass
produce and ship frozen mice (to include MICE ON ICE) for about $.20 a
serving. Not bad. We use RodentPro for most of our food needs, but at
70+ snakes we decided to try and offset some of the cost of buying food
by breeding our own. We started our own mouse colonies and have all
of the information here.

Housing our snakes

We found some cool web-sites that have apartment complexes for
snakes. The one that we are using is from Boaphile plastics. They are
nice, safe and the people there are great to work with!

Another resource for larger homes is Exotics by Nature Snake Rack.

For a smaller shoe box size rack, try Clay Davenports site. We bought
our supplies from

Hibernating our adult corn snakes.

We decided to hibernate our adult and some of our yearling corn
snakes. We did this for three reasons.

Save on some food. Not having to feed around 20 snakes for 2
months is pretty cool in itself.
Give the kids a much needed break. There is slightly less cleaning
to worry about and definetely less snakes to handle each week
Opens up the possibility of breeding our adults. We are still
discussing this option, but with hibernation it makes it more
possible if we decide to do it. Snakes to not have to be put into
hibernation (brumation is the more appropriate term) but it helps to
figure out when the female is ovulating and assists in making the
eggs and sperm more viable from what we have read.