I'm for maternal incubation also. I'm not a breeder though. Just a mother with a husband and 2 kids who really like snakes.

I don't trust myself enough to properly incubate eggs. I trust the snake more to know how to keep the eggs at proper conditions even when things aren't exactly correct. I'm thinking if I ever mess up the incubator, that's it, eggs are dead. If I mess up in maternal incubation, there's still a chance mama snake was able to adjust the egg conditions to keep them alive.

My one and only attempt at breeding, we maternally incubated until day 60 when mom left the eggs, so we moved the eggs to our back-up el cheapo cooler incubator to hatch off. So yeah, back-up incubator is a requirement. So, one could ask, why bother maternally incubating when you still have to have an incubator anyway? Good question.

On feeding - I've done it two ways - leave the mom in the egg box and put the rat in the tub with her. She uncoiled half her body from the eggs, grabbed the rat, swallowed, then coiled right back. We've also done it where we uncoil her from the eggs ourselves and moved her to her feeding tub (our usual process before she laid eggs). We put her back with the eggs and she coils right back around the eggs.

Really interesting - for the 60 days she was incubating, she never pooped! Wierd.