Our normal quarantine is 3 months but that's not a hard and fast rule. If a snake just doesn't feel right to us, is having any feeding issues, etc. then it just stays in QT. If any new snakes are added into QT, the clock restarts on any snake already there.

Because we occasionally have done rescues and do snake "sit" for some people and have a mixed collection of pythons, boas and a colubrid we keep them all seperated and we are very anal about rules. QT is upstairs in a corner of our large master bedroom, the established collection of ball pythons have their own closed room on another floor, the boas and the milksnake are kept in our livingroom. Any snake in quarantine upstairs never leaves that room and is not handled by visitors or any of our children.

When we feed or handle it's ball pythons first, boas and milksnake second, quarantined snakes always last. These may seem to be overly strict rules to some. For us it's meant no spread of disease ever, no mites ever *knock wood*. We're still relatively new to keeping a good number of snakes but as my granny always said...."start as you mean to go on".