My female adult BP has been spending an excessive (I think) amount of time soaking in her water dish for the past two weeks and not wanting to be handled. She even attempted to bite my fiance through the screen top of her tank last week when he was next to her tank turning on the air conditioner.

She is eating a medium sized frozen/thawed rat once a week (and gets more cranky if we go longer than 10 days without feeding her, the piggy!) and has defecated twice in the month or so that I have had her.

Tank temp is 80 degrees F, humidity is 46%. Her habitat has a halved clay garden pot as a hide, her water dish, and coconut fiber substrate. Heater is an under-tank mat at about 1/3 point of her tank. Tank is a 50 gallon glass tank with a sliding mesh screen on top. Her tank is in my bedroom, so it's not in a heavily trafficked area of the house. In the evenings when the ambient temperature of the room cools down, I put a towel over 3/4 of the top to keep the heat inside so that it doesn't drop below 75 at the coolest.

I've checked her for mites, and haven't seen any evidence of those pesky buggers. A few of her scales seemed to be loose, so I was thinking maybe she was getting ready for a shed cycle, but haven't seen any other evidence of her going into a shed. (Her belly is still cream colored, her scales don't look dull, and her eyes haven't gone grey.)

The not wanting to be handled at all part is what's concerning me the most, as well as disappointing me. For the first few days she had no problem with me handling her, but she's been acting this way since the first time we fed her after we bought her. (Two or three days after we bought her, actually, because the store we bought her from feeds their reptiles on Sunday evenings and we picked her up on Sunday afternoon, her first feeding here was the Tuesday evening after we got her.)

Every site I've looked on for answers has said mites are the only reason that a BP will spend that much time soaking, and since I've already ruled that out I'm getting rather frustrated with the lack of answers. I would really like to get her used to being handled again, but I don't want to stress her out by pushing it when she is obviously not wanting the attention.

Any ideas/suggestions/help you guys can offer would be much appreciated! She's my first reptile, I've done YEARS of research before I ever bought her to prepare for her, and I'm stumped! She's getting a household reputation for being "cranky".