Been Battling Mites For Months!

Hey guys, so I am really tired of mites, I have been battling them for months, literally like 7 months. Time and time again I find myself cleaning out the tubs, spraying down everything and washing everything, spraying down the animals and rack and time and time again the mites always return! It is not a bad outbreak, just a few here and there, but it is so frustrating. I have used natural chemicals (i think thats what its called) and mite off by zoomed. Do i need to cough up the 20 bucks for prevent a mite? am i missing something? I even washed my sheets (that hang near the rack) and vacuum around the rack all the time!

I know some people dislike it, but I swear by the Provent a mite. I had a horrible outbreak in my collection a few months back. A ton of manual labor and 2 treaments with PAM knocked it out completely.

How often are you cleaning out your tubs and cages? The trick with mites is to break the egg laying cycle, which is very short. I bathed snakes and disenfected tubs every day. That may have been over kill, but it worked.

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PAM is good stuff...
I had a bad case of mites after buying a snake at a show several months back. I treated her with natural chemistry spray after bringing her home, but must have missed some mite eggs or something.. 4 weeks later there were so many in her QT tub that she was soaking (it seemed like they appeared overnight). I treated her with the spray again, and put PAM treated paper towels in her tub. I had to spray her and replace the paper towels 2 weeks later with new treated ones (the PAM stays active for 2 weeks). After that, they were gone. (so in total, I treated for 1 month).

I would get the PAM. You only use a tiny amount and it lasts a long time. A couple points though:
1. It only works on substrate that will absorb it (spray it on paper towels or newsprint).
2. It has to completely dry before you put the snake back in and you should not spray with water bowls in the tub (replace them after it has dried).
3. Spray on the carpet around the enclosure and around other enclosures to prevent them from hopping to a new home.

If you are having a continuous problem, you might want to treat all of your enclosures at one time, just in case.

You need to tackle the problem with full force or it will keep coming back. It may take a couple cans of PAM I would suggest removing your animals from the room, hold them over in a PAM treated container for a couple hours. PAM everything! Go through every cage you have make sure you are thorough i cant emphasize enough to get every nook and cranny. I too had a mite problem a couple years back I was fed up with it and decided to do what I explained above and it worked for me have been mite free for 2 years now. I swear by PAM now you can try lice killer but PAM just works better.

Mite off does not work and never has so yeah $20 for PAM would be a smart choice right now especially since you have been dealing with mites for 7 months.

Common sense will tell you that if the treatment does not work after 2 rounds it's probably because the product just does not work.

Mite off might kill the adults but dies nothing to the eggs which means re-infestation every 30 days.


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The main advantage of provent a mite is that it stays in the environment for a very long time. Clean out your cages/tubs and let them dry. Spray on the PAM on the floors, walls, cracks/crevices around the door/rack and allow to thoroughly dry before putting your furniture and substrate back in. This will give you a PAM barrier that should last over a month. This will kill any current mites that you have and more importantly any new mites as they hatch. Do ALL of your snakes/cages like this even the ones that don't appear to be infested.

You could also do the NIX treatment, very similar to pam as far as ingrediants, just you have to make it. In Canada i know breeders that use it every 6 months (just to make sure) there's nothing. PAM here is 45.99$ a Can so a bottle of 10$ nix is very good. and has the permithin or w.e it is called

Both Zoomed Mite Off and Natural Chemistry Reptile Spray will kill mites on contact and are safe to use on the snake, BUT they are not insecticides and they do not persist. They lose their effectiveness once they dry. Since eggs can take anywhere from 2 to 30 days to hatch, your snakes keep getting re-infested.

Provent-A-Mite (PAM) contains the insecticide permethrin at 0.5% strength delivered by aerosol. Permethrin's half-life is about a month, assuming it is not in direct UV light. Once dry it is also safe for your snake.

RID or NIX head lice treatment also contains permethrin, and a 2-oz bottle mixed with a gallon of water has proven effective at killing mites. While a weaker solution than PAM, it is applied more heavily using a spray bottle. It's advantage is that it is cheaper and more readily available than PAM; there's no need to order online and wait for it to arrive.

Whichever permethrin product you decide to use, this thread has excellent how-to instructions for eradicating the little buggers: http://ball-pythons.net/forums/showt...it-with-AaronP

Permethrin doesn't kill mite eggs, but it kills the mites during the off-snake stages in their life cycle. This is why you must replace soiled paper substrate with permethrin-treated paper, and why you should re-treat the enclosure and surrounding area every two weeks for 1-2 months.

Also, any snake in QT should be assumed to have mites and treated as such for at least the first 30 days.

Here's what I did the one time I had a mite outbreak:

1) put everyone on papertowel/newspaper.
2) remove water from tubs
3) spray down each tub with PAM correctly
4) let air dry
5) put snakes back in

You do this and the next day you'll see dead mites everywhere. I also sprayed the rack and slots where the tubs go. Mites need blood to live, so as long as they can't feed off your snakes, anything that is running around will soon die. Do this once a month (some people say once every two weeks but I'm not a fan of chemicals) and it'll be gone in no time.

I had a snake with mites so bad one time that from just holding her your hand would be full of black freckles. After one PAM treatment she was clear.

PAM is SO easy to use!

Take a roll of paper towel. Unroll however many pieces as you have tubs. 20 tubs = 20 sheets of paper towel. Spray it with the PAM and let is dry. Then just put 1 sheet in each tub and in 2 weeks all your mites and eggs will be gone.