So the other day, I was taking pictures of a few of the snakes. Looking through them, I noticed one had mites in her eyes. I soaked her in a separate tub for about 30 minutes and bleached (water solution, don't worry) her tub and everything in it. The next day, I bought Reptile Relief at my local pet store and treated her with it. Tonight, I noticed that my breeding female (who is very likely gravid) had mites in her eyes, as well. So, I put both females in separate tubs, sprayed them down with Reptile Relief, bleached their tubs and everything in them, and then rinsed off both animals and put them back to bed.

As I was doing this, I noticed that the first ball to have mites no longer had them in her eyes. I treated her anyway, obviously, but when I was done, I looked over the rest of my collection. Two others, my spider male and dinker female, had mites. I don't have time to treat them and their tubs tonight, so I'll do it tomorrow, but will the bleach plus soaking and Reptile Relief work until my PAM arrives? It's all I can do right now. I still have no idea where the mites came from. Everyone is on the same bedding, so I figured that couldn't be it. Everyone is fed from the same colony of rats, and the mites have just now shown up, so I don't think it's them. There's only two things I can think of:

1) My gecko viv has some natural fauna from the live plants and soil, but they feed on his feces and stay on the soil. I've never seen any mites crawling in or out of the viv, nor have I seen them crawling on the gecko. But could it be him?

2) My forensic science/bio teacher keeps two balls in his room. He could take better care of them, but they both eat and grow and shed and are otherwise healthy. My hypothesis (albeit it's a rather large leap) is that a student in another class had one of the snakes out on my table, and that snake happened to have mites, meaning I may have transferred the mites and/or eggs to my own collection. I know, it's a pretty far-out hypothesis, but I'll be checking over his snakes tomorrow, just to be sure.


Anyway, I'll likely never find out where they came from, but regardless, will the routine I'm doing now work? I do fully plan on treating every snake in this house with PAM once it arrives, but will the bleach do the trick before it gets here?