Ok, someone called BS on me when I posted the history as I remember it on another site but I'm pretty sure that it's something like this ....

CB = Captive Bred

However, once they started hatching ball pythons in Africa they had to decide what to call them. They either dig these eggs up after they are laid or catch the gravid females - supposedly they let the females go after laying but I kind of doubt it. Years ago (like when they first started bringing in African babies, before that it was mostly adults that didn't acclimate well at all) there was an article in the old Reptiles and Amphibians magazine by a guy who went over and followed a trapper. The trapper even kept a big rat he found for dinner. I don't see people in desperate enough straits to spend all day digging out a hole in the ground with a truck leaf spring letting anything go that could possibly put food on their table.

Anyway, back to the terms ...

Someone conveniently decided that CB stood for captive born rather than captive bred so that they could use it to describe the African hatched eggs. Intentionally or not this resulted in enough confusion that to this day most every pet store selling baby balls this time of year will swear that they are captive bred (and almost none of them are). There was a backlash to using CB for captive born including pointing out that pythons hatch (maybe the offspring of a wild caught gravid boa could be called captive born?). To clear things up someone invented CBB for Captive Bred and Born to distinguish ones that where bred in captivity from the now corrupt CB. They also came up with CH for captive hatched for the African wild-bred babies. I think this is still a little bit of a copout because even captive bred are necessarily captive hatched, you should use something like Wild Bred Captive Hatched to describe the unique situation with the baby balls that are imported this time of year. I also have a bit of a problem with calling them "Farmed" because as far as I know they are not doing anything to produce these animals other than digging them up, maybe "Harvested" would be more accurate.