15/08/08
Well I am finally off to Cyprus for two weeks. I actually fly out on Sunday morning, I hope people don’t ring my mobile while I’m away. It costs me every time they get through to my answer machine but I don’t know how to turn it off, in fact I don’t think Vodafone allow it to be switched off and the worst thing is that I can’t even retrieve my messages until I get back to the UK. Anyway I’m off and I can’t wait for a break. I have a very busy day ahead of me, yesterday I cleaned lots of cages but the actual feeding needs to be done today, unfortunately it is not one of those jobs that you can do in advance. I will need to feed all the spiders, scorpions, cockroaches, millipedes, snails, beetles etc – all in one day! Tomorrow is packing and ‘family’ day and then on Sunday morning I will be up bright and early to do last minute feeding and cleaning. There is no doubt that the worst thing about my job is that is very difficult to get away. I have been cutting back on stock for several weeks but I still have a huge number of bugs and setting them up for two weeks without me is a mammoth task. There are 22 members of my family going on this holiday and that doesn’t leave anyone behind who knows a thing about my animals. Hopefully my mother in-law, neighbours and friends will cope and there won’t be any major problems.
It’s been a good week sales wise, everyone else seems to be returning from their holidays and wanting to get new bugs. A very good customer of mine came over and picked up lots of last minute bargains a couple of days ago. I have two tarantulas with egg sacs and my beautiful Katydids look like they are about to lay. I am expecting to see some eggs on my return. My second female Gecko is sitting in the nesting box, alas the egg from my other female has rotted away. I think it got slightly too damp, I have been reading about DIY incubators.
Well that’s it, I had better go out to the bug house and get started. I’m pleased to see a bit of sun this morning, I will doubtless be walking from the house to the bugs a couple of dozen times today and it’s no fun in the rain.
I will be furiously buying in new stock upon my return, I already have a long list of customers ‘wants’.
08/08/08
What a smart date 08/08/08! After cutting back on livestock for my holiday, everything seems to be breeding. I have an Indonesian Chocolate tarantula with an egg sac, a Trinidad Chevron with an egg sac and my Chile Rose spiders have mated. I was pleased that the male survived the mating, unlike the Trinidad Chevron male who was chewed up and unceremoniously dumped in the water bowl. My lovely Crested Geckos have also produced ‘one’ egg. I have never kept Gecko eggs before but I really hope it will hatch.
After all my moaning last week about my family being arachnophobic, I had a good idea. Perhaps I should hire myself out to remove spiders from houses? Some people would pay a fortune to have the ‘monster’ taken away! I’m always looking for ways to make my fortune, I don’t think it will happen breeding bugs! Actually sales have been pretty poor again this week, I’m sure things will improve when the schools go back. I will be buying in lots of new animals after my holiday so things are bound to pick up – I hope!
I was rather upset this week when some nasty comments appeared on a forum website. I know I shouldn’t take it to heart, I get far, far more praise than criticism but it isn’t nice when I try so hard. I was very grateful to one of my regular customers who alerted me to the post and those customers who immediately added that their experiences of buying from me have all been good. It is obviously a case of you can’t please everyone all of the time. There were also moans about some of my spider prices but it then seemed interesting when one of the guys who posts on this site said he was fed up with seeing adult spiders stuck in cricket tubs, in terrible conditions, in pet shops. I rest my case, it costs time and money to care for any animals properly, whatever their size and however many legs they have.
The lady making rude comments on the forum thought that a spiderling that I sold her was improperly identified. I actually told her to see how the spider looked after it moulted and get back to me (which she didn’t). I haven’t had many instances when a spiderling has been incorrectly identified but it must happen and it is certainly something that worries me. I have a lot of experience with spiders but a great many of the spiderlings look similar if not identical. I have to trust the supplier of the spiders. I don’t think I have ever had anyone deliberately sell me incorrectly identified spiderlings but obviously we are all human and mistakes happen. It could happen when pots become muddled and labels mixed up. If I am in any doubt about a spiderling I keep it until it grows a little and it then, generally becomes obvious. I can only remember two incidences when customers have received the wrong spiders. Obviously I have been extremely apologetic and offered a full refund, replacement etc. I am trying to keep better records of the origin of my spiders but it isn’t possible all the time as they come and go so frequently. I have been keeping these records for almost a year now and it has shown some interesting results. I source spiders from many different suppliers but I can now see that two of my most trusted breeders have sold me incorrectly identified spiderlings, not a batch, just one or two. I’m sure this is an honest mistake but at present I have four spiderlings that I am growing on ‘just in case’. It’s quite interesting trying to work out what the spiders are as they grow but I certainly don’t want my customers to have this job!
Anyway must get on, I need to clean and re-arrange the bug house before Sunday as I have my ‘holiday helpers’ coming over on Sunday afternoon to learn what to do when I’m away. I have written labels for the cages and tanks that need attention and hopefully my printed instruction sheet will be clear. My mother in-law arrives on Monday so I will be training her up on all my pets and plants, in preparation for the long awaited family holiday to Cyprus next weekend.
01/08/08
Ooh, it’s only two weeks until my holiday! I’m pleased to say that sales have been better this week. I can’t believe how much work there is to do when I have spent ages cutting down on the animals. Quite a bit of my day is spent washing jars, boxes and cages and ‘potting up’ as I call it. This basically means moving bugs around into smaller or larger containers, housing up young spiders, praying mantids etc. It has certainly made me realise that I must streamline my work. Much as I love the bugs there are only so many animals that one person can look after on their own. When I get back from my holiday I will be buying in lots of new stock but I think I need to try and get rarer bugs and not get things in because they are cheap. Cheap bugs are generally the more common ones but they take just as much time to look after and will obviously not sell so well. I will try and be more specific to my customer’s needs and source the animals that people are asking for. Everyone (probably a bit of an exaggeration) wants Goliath Birdeating spiders (Theraphosa blondi) at the moment. The only ones that I have been able to track down are going for an incredible amount of money but perhaps that’s the sort of thing I should get in. Unfortunately I cannot say for sure what will sell but when several people are asking for the same thing I think I should try and obtain it! The other animal that I have had many requests for over the last few weeks is the Land Hermit Crab. I really love these animals but they are impossible to breed in captivity and because of this I tend to steer away from them but they are long lived and fascinating pets so I will endeavour to get some upon my return.
I am still in a flap about leaving my bugs and how they will cope without me for two weeks. I think things are as organised as they are ever going to get but it’s been an eye opener asking people in my ‘everyday life’ if they would like to help look after the bugs. Replies have ranged from I ‘think’ I’m on holiday myself then’, to the completely unprintable. I think it’s my family and friends that are potty but they tend to think it’s me that’s nuts. Last night was a good example, my husband was watching tv in bed and I was drifting off to sleep, all over a sudden he woke me up with ‘what’s that on the ceiling’. I told him it was a moth but he persisted that it was a spider, I tried to convince him that if it was a spider, it was a tiny one and it wouldn’t do him any harm. He just couldn’t accept that and made me get up, find something to put it in (my earrings box) and then I had to catch the ‘huge monster’. It was a little spider, body length no longer than a centimetre – what was all the fuss about! My niece rang me in the week, she was worried that her bedroom was infested with cockroaches. I told her that the two bugs she described were more likely beetles that had flown in her window so now she won’t open the window in her bedroom ‘just in case’. That leads me onto a very funny phone call that I had this week. Lots of people start their emails or phone conversations with something like ‘ I know this is strange but’, most of the time I have heard it many times before but I have to admit that this was different! I don’t want to offend anyone, I really doubt that the guy concerned would be reading my blog and it made me laugh so much that I have to repeat it. The guy was very nicely spoken and said that he loves British spiders and wondered if I thought that there was a market for breeding them to release as pest control. To cut a long story short his idea was to release spiders into people’s houses to eat flies that cause a nuisance in the summer months. I tried to point out that my family would rather be in a room filled with flies than a room with a single spider in it. I’m laughing as I write this but as far as I can tell he was serious! I do have some funny conversations on the phone and although I sometimes think it could be a wind up, it very rarely is! Hey, my job is never boring.
25/07/08
What a strange week! Where have all my customers gone? I strongly suspect on holiday is the answer. Most schools broke up last week or the beginning of this week and my sales took a nose drive. I spoke too soon last week when I said how well my ‘cutting down on animals sale’ was going.
I’ve had a good week apart from this hic-up. We had a big surprise party for my sister and brother in-law last Saturday. The party was great and I got to take all the catering boxes home! I have enough Waitrose food boxes to last for several weeks. It is a huge problem to get enough boxes to send out the bugs each week. The boxes need to be reasonably small but most supermarket boxes are too big, plus the fact they are not left out in the shops very often these days. The boxes are generally ripped up and stacked outside for recycling. I think it makes sense to let people pack their shopping in the boxes, then we can recycle the boxes later (or send bugs off in them) and it would cut down on plastic bags. I’m told that cardboard boxes near the tills are considered a fire risk (it’s the health and safety police again). I have looked into buying boxes but apart from the expense, it seems that I would need to buy in a huge amount and I just don’t have the space to store them. When we lived in our old house in Middlesex we had a huge loft but it certainly isn’t the same when you live in a bungalow, especially since we had the ‘top floor’ put on, the only storage is under the eaves and although I’m slim, it really isn’t easy to get in or out of there. I’m not moaning though, I love leafy Buckinghamshire and I no longer need to fill the car with bramble for the stick insects, I can just grab my dog and walk across the road to the fields. I’m pleased to say that my bramble patch at the end of the garden is growing well. I am growing quite a few of my own insect food plants now. We have had to lop all the tops off of the numerous Eucalyptus trees that I planted a couple of years ago. I have nothing that feeds on them now and I’ve got loads of that ugly Hypericum growing in pots and the garden. When I had stick insects that needed to feed on it I had terrible trouble getting hold of it, isn’t that typical.
I must just have a little moan this week about the number of people who email me for advice about an animal that they have bought elsewhere. If they are customers of mine that’s fine but these are people that I have never dealt with. I spend a lot of time replying to emails and it’s a great way to communicate but all I really want to say to these people is “ask the person you bought it from”, so it’s probably best to say nothing. Visitors, is another moan this week, I think I need to write a few rules for people who are calling, I will get onto it when I get back from my holiday. I was not at all pleased yesterday when a customer did not turn up as arranged. I had organised my day around this person and Thursday is generally a busy day for me. Thankfully I had taken a mobile number and called when he didn’t show up. He had completely forgotten! It isn’t easy when you work from home, the door bell to my bug house has stopped working so I have to wait in the house. It takes time to clean and clear up for visitors and I have to lock away my dog, who isn’t always keen on people that she doesn’t know (or some that she does know). Most people who call are considerate and phone if they are going to be late but too many don’t and this leaves me hanging around and I seriously have better things to do. I want to lift my ban on children under 12 but the problem is that some people treat my place like a free zoo. It is a really tricky problem, the last thing that I want to do is upset people so I need to work out some basic rules. I won’t be using the line that so many of my ‘male’ customers have suggested ‘no time wasters’ but sometimes it’s tempting!
18/07/08
Another week of summer has gone by and where’s the sunshine? Yes, it’s nice and warm but I’m fed up with cloudy skies and drizzle.
Still re-arranging and cutting back before my holiday, everyone keeping wishing me a happy holiday but it is still a whole four weeks away! It is difficult to explain to people just how much I need to cut back, sales have been really good but I would like to clear a good third of the bugs that I have before leaving everything for a fortnight. Many of the bugs will be fine for two weeks, the spiders, scorpions, millipedes, can be fed up in advance or certainly for the smaller carnivores I can place maggots in their cages at intervals before I go and they will hatch regularly while I’m away (it works well). However I don’t want to spend two days before I go and two days when I come back frantically feeding and cleaning! I need time to pack and do non bug things. My long suffering mother-in-law is coming to house sit, she lives a long way away and it isn’t fair if I don’t spend any time with her. I have so many spiders now, I have more or less spent the last two days feeding and cleaning the larger spiders and today I need to feed and clean the smaller ones. It takes such a long time! I have had several customers call this week, it’s nice to chat to people who also keep bugs (generally a lot less than me). One of my regular callers was talking to a customer of his and mentioned that he was coming to see me. The guy on the phone then said “Oh Virginia’s far too expensive”, this got us chatting about pricing. I don’t claim to be the cheapest but I do aim to be the best. I have been selling pet bugs for longer than anyone else in this country, others come and go. Most people don’t realise what hard work goes into breeding and keeping all these animals. That said I may well be the cheapest on some of the bugs that I have bred myself but I will obviously need to charge more for bugs that I have purchased and I am determined to factor in my time. Last year I had a real crisis, I was very tempted to give it all up and get a regular job with regular hours but I do love the bugs and I have some great customers/friends. I think I have managed to turn things around somewhat but it is always a struggle to make anything like enough money for the hours that I put in. I really do get very, very few complaints and I get tons of lovely emails from happy customers. I do intend to sort some out and put them on my site (no names mentioned). It really does keep me going when there are not enough hours in the day!
I do seem to have rambled on this week but I must get my daughter sorted out now as she needs a large filling at the dentist in an hour. I had written some notes for my blog earlier this week and I haven’t used any of them, never mind, there’s always next week.
11/07/08
I have been doing lots of re-arranging in my bug house this week. I’ve more or less given up on the Chinese mantids (see blog a few weeks ago), they are now sub-adults and most have a ‘bent’ abdomen. I have put them all in a huge glass tank with plenty of foliage to hide amongst and lots of food, flies, cockroaches and crickets. I know that some will get eaten but hopefully others will moult into adults, mate and then lay egg cases. I have spoken to a friend who also keeps mantids and he agrees that the problem is space, or lack of it. In the wild Chinese mantids would not spend hours sitting in the same position, they are a large, active mantis and need more room than I can give them. The best that I can do is to house them individually in large plastic jars but it obviously doesn’t work. These mantids are always imported from North America in the Spring, they hibernate as egg cases so they are very easy to post and each egg case can produce up to 200 nymphs! Next year I may just let them have the freedom of my bug house and see what happens. This is the only species of mantis that I have ever had this problem with and I have kept many, many mantids over the years.
My pre-holiday sale is perhaps going a little too well. I have actually sold out of many animals in the last week. Yes, I am selling lots on my special offers page but if you are after something in particular the time to buy it is now or you may be disappointed. I will not be buying in anything new until early September, however my own bugs are breeding all the time so the web site is still changing on a daily basis.
Everybody talks about the ‘wow factor’, especially with all the reality tv shows that are around these days (I love Big Brother even if my husband says that I’m a sad person). I was feeding my small spiders this week, they are all in individual plastic boxes, I opened the lid of the Trinidad Dwarf Tiger Rump (Cyriocosmus elegans) and actually went ‘wow’ out loud. The spider had moulted and although it is still pretty small, the colours and markings are amazing, it really is the most beautiful spider. I haven’t seen one of these before, when I got them they were just tiny dots in the vermiculite. I am also pleased to say that one of the Furry Beauty spiders has moulted and is looking great. These are one of my favourites, they are similar to Pink Toes but jump around a lot. Speaking of Jumping, I have mated the last two Yellow Indonesian Jumping spiders (the completely different looking black one was obviously the male of the species). One has laid an egg sac and I am hoping the second one will soon.
I am writing this blog a day early as I’m having a day off tomorrow and going up to London for a trip on the London Eye. I booked the trip months ago as an anniversary present for my husband. I’m sure we will have a nice day anyway, but I do hope it doesn’t rain too much. It does make me laugh when the garden centres are promoting drought resistant plants and all my potted plants are water logged.
04/07/08
I don’t know where this week has gone, it seems to have passed in a flash, I can’t believe it’s Friday already. My pre-holiday sale has got off to a good start, last week I wrote that there would be lots of bargains and several spider species have already sold out. I put my year old Golden Starburst Baboon spiders on ‘super-special offer’ at £2.00 each and they have nearly all gone now.
I was very upset to hear a couple of months ago that both the Small Tortoiseshell and Peacock butterflies are in danger of dying out in this country. Evidently their numbers have been decimated by a parasite that attacks the caterpillars. I have been searching all my local stinging nettle patches ever since, looking for the tell tale webbing of the butterfly larvae. After many stings I hadn’t found anything. I have seen one adult Peacock butterfly in local fields but absolutely no Small Tortoiseshells. Then last weekend a neighbour of mine found some Peacock larvae on nettles next to her allotment. I went to look immediately and there were three distinct groups. I am really pleased with this sighting but what has happened to all the Small Tortoiseshells, have you seen any this year?? I have read about sightings in Sussex. My buddleia bush is now coming into bloom, it generally attracts butterflies from far and wide. The bush is huge and directly outside my bug house so I will have to keep a close eye on it.
The only new animal that I have had in this week is a number of Giant African snails, not the usual ones but the huge Achatina marginata. They lay small batches of yellow eggs that look like bird’s eggs. The snails are great but I have far too many, they are eating me out of house and home. It’s just as well I have grown so many lettuces this year.
All the bugs seem to be doing well, I’m sure the sunshine helps. Some time ago I had a huge netting Flexarium cage but I decided it was too big and got rid of it. I’m really wishing that I had kept it now as it would have made a great outdoor cage for some mantids. It would be good to have a netted off area on my bug house veranda, I will have to put it on my husband’s never ending list of jobs!
27/06/08
We had a lovely winning weekend at Donnington Park watching the MotoGP. I should have been feeling refreshed and ready for action this week but that damn crow is still attacking our patio windows and waking us at 4-5am every morning.
It is only 7 weeks now until our summer holiday so I am seriously cutting back on stock. I won’t be buying in anything new after 1 st July so animals will start selling out and not be replaced until I return at the beginning of September. It may sound a long way off but I cannot leave the amount of animals that I have now and go away for two weeks (even with friends and family helping out). The bugs that I need to cut down on most are those that require daily attention eg. stick insects and praying mantis. It is so difficult when people offer me new and exciting bugs but I must stay strong and resist!
The main focus of this last week seems to have been scorpions. I have sold lots of Imperial scorpions and various other species. I was also delighted to discover that one of my Asian Blacks has lots of babies on her back and one of my Wood scorpions too. Looking at my weekly tick list it is ‘scorpion feeding day’ today. I must check on my gravid Desert Hairy, she is either going to have babies soon or go pop. I hope to be able to see into her burrow with a torch but it may not be possible as she has built a series of tunnels. People often ask how big the scorpions are and I am never sure how to measure them. I generally measure them as they sit with the tail rolled up but they are obviously longer with the tail included. I don’t think scorpions like their tails uncurled and I don’t want to upset them! Some scorpions are very fast moving, especially the smaller species. It’s nice to see that scorpions are becoming more popular as pets. I really like them, I think they are fascinating to watch but I often struggle to sell them and end up keeping them for months on end.
Keep checking my special offers and clearance pages, I will be putting lots of bargains on my site over the next few weeks but some of these offers may not last long. My super special offer on Golden Starburst baboon spiders is going very well, I really needed to cut down on them after my successful breeding last year.
20/06/08
Nothing too eventful has happened this week. I have spent a lot of time organising the bugs so that I can leave them for the weekend. It’s amazing how much planning is needed for a weekend away. My mum always used to say that nobody is indispensable but that just isn’t true when it comes to my animals. Nobody else has a clue! Our daughter will be following instructions but if the instructions aren’t clear enough things will die. I just find it such a responsibility at times. My bug house gets very dry and lots of jars, tanks, net cages need spraying regularly but other cages must not get damp at all. I will go around today putting colourful stickers on everything that needs spraying but if the mantids are sprayed directly when they are in a moult, they may well be damaged beyond repair.
Anyway we ARE going away, I love competitions, especially the slogan ones and I have won a weekend for two to the MotoGP at Donnington Park. My husband is a motorbike fanatic so he will love it and I’m going along for the hospitality, free food, drink, hotel etc. We will get to go in the paddock, meet the team and enjoy a VIP weekend.
Update on last week : The crows are still waking us with their squawking but they seem to have given up on attacking our windows. Perhaps we can wipe off the greenhouse shading soon. I have put three large Chinese mantids in super deluxe cages, they are perfect at the moment, we will see how they do after a moult. I also wonder if light plays a part? My bug house is quite dark as it has a large veranda shading it. This doesn’t matter for the arachnids and other nocturnal bugs but I am beginning to realise that it does matter to some. My bush crickets are doing amazingly well since I set them up in a lighted tank. I haven’t lost any and they have just started to mature. They look beautiful with their wings and they are a bright green colour, some have started to chirp, it’s a really nice sound. I need to set up some more tanks with lights but everything takes time and I would have to move things around to make some space. I also have to be careful not to put too much weight on some of the shelves as they are attached to the walls of my log cabin. I have visions of it collapsing but I am assured that it is very strong. I spent a fortune on free standing shelving when we first put up the bug house but I couldn’t make it work with all the plastic boxes. I needed longer shelves, the ones I have now are really good. They are white melamine so they are easy to clean and they are wider than the shelving units.
I am trying to get some more praying mantis species at the moment but I do need to start thinking about my summer holiday. We are going away mid August this year, later than usual due to family events, I will need to stop buying so much and concentrate on selling what I’ve got!
13/06/08
Well I have survived the week with my husband away. Thank goodness I have had no major technical problems, I am a complete technophobe and he is certainly my IT support. The computer has been fine and the website too but I did have a panic a couple of days ago when the new printer ran out of toner and I didn’t know how to change the cartridge but I got there in the end, I did get covered in black ink. Actually I should be careful what I say as it is Friday 13 th and he doesn’t return until tomorrow!
It has been a much quieter week, I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I have had far less orders which always worries me but there again I have had some time to sort out re-housing and re-arranging my cages. The Chinese mantids have been driving me mad, they have reached a good size and many are now showing signs of ‘bottom drop’. I really don’t know what the problem is but it frequently happens with this species of mantis, I have never had it with any other. The abdomen seems to flop down, it doesn’t affect the mantis, they generally eat and moult as usual and become perfect adults. I think it is a problem with space. I do not have the room to house each individual mantis in a large cage with a plant. I think they probably need to sit upright and that isn’t really possible in a sweet jar. They tend to sit horizontally on the lid and that’s when the abdomen drops. I have two large cages that I intend to set up today with greenery and places to hide, I will also release plenty of flies into the cage just in case food is a contributing factor. Not all the mantids are affected so I will see how they get on in these cages. Unfortunately Chinese mantids are very unsociable, I couldn’t risk putting more than one mantis in each cage as I know one would be eaten by the other. Anyway I will report back next week.
I had an email a few days ago about the Indonesian Jumping spiders. One of my customers suggested that they may be the same species but that the female is yellow and the male is black. I had no idea but when I did a Google search it seems that Jumping spiders often have male and females that look nothing like each other. It does make sense as I now have two egg sacs from the yellow spiders. We live and learn.
My biggest problem this week has been ‘mad’ crows. It sounds funny, I was laughing at first but after over a week of being woken between 4am – 5am I’m not laughing anymore. The birds are attacking our windows. I think it started when our daughter’s foil birthday balloons were near the window in the lounge. Everyone knows that crows like shiny objects but it has got ridiculous. I moved the balloons and before my husband went away he painted out the side window with greenhouse shading. It worked for that window but they then switched to patio doors and I refuse to paint them out! It really is like something out of the Alfred Hitchcock film ‘The Birds’. I think I will have to ring the RSPB for advice but I’m not hopeful that they will have any ideas. The noise that the birds make is awful. I love all animals but I have lain in bed thinking of getting a catapult. The birds are nowhere to be seen during the day, they stop about 7am!
Really pleased to have got some Pink Footed Goliath (Theraphosa apophysis) spiders in this week!
06/06/08
I finally seem to be getting on top of things again after going potty and buying in far too much live stock. I’ve had a good week, lots of orders going out, which frees up cages for other bugs. My Wandering spiders are getting really big, I have had them since they were spiderlings (almost invisible dots). They still move like lightening but at least I can see them now. I have re-housed them all into large jars this week, they had been housed in plastic tubs but they were getting too cramped. I have also re-housed the last few Jumping spiders, I think they were getting a bit too damp in the plastic bug boxes so I have put them into jars with netting lids (hopefully they won’t bite their way out). My beautiful Indonesian Pink Toe spider has moulted, I don’t want to disturb her but I think it is a ‘her’, I can’t see any mating hooks, which is good. The bad thing is that if she was mated in the wild she won’t be laying any egg sacs now that she has moulted. It wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t moaning, so here goes – why do people still keep emailing me with ‘I only want a female spider’? My reply always has to be ‘don’t we all’! I cannot sex spiders, I don’t want to learn because I am not mean enough to palm off all the males onto my customers. Nobody is going to pay double for a female so the only way is to accept a fifty/fifty chance and receive a happy, healthy specimen – that’s the best I can do. There is a note on my site but many people don’t seem to see it. The same applies to sizing spiders, just this morning I had an email asking me what I mean by small, medium and large spiders. There is an explanation on both spider pages and the FAQ page.
This week my husband set up a second page for spiders. I have so many spiders now, both tarantulas and true spiders. The one page was far too long so I now have a ‘tarantulas’ page and a ‘true spiders and tarantula gallery’ page. I hope it is clear, I haven’t had any complaints (yet). The tarantula gallery is quite popular if you are too far away to visit. That said, I do have a number of people who come and look at the spiders from all over the UK. I think the reason is that spiders become proper pets. They live for many years and are all quite different, with their own personalities. They are not like stick insects, mantids, beetles, that only live for a short while. I do like it when people refer to tarantulas as eight legged hamsters!
Giant millipedes seem to be in vogue at the moment. I cannot believe how many millipedes I have sold in the last few weeks. I’m sure I have never sold so many in all the years that I’ve been keeping them. The really giant millipedes always sell out fast, I had some huge Giant Chocolate and Giant Train from the last exhibition but I have just one left now. I always keep the soil and hope for babies. It isn’t easy to find the eggs as they are so well camouflaged. If I am lucky I find tiny white baby millipedes. Unfortunately millipedes can be quite difficult to breed in captivity. I have quite a few captive bred juveniles at the moment but not many have been actually bred by me.
Well must get on, my husband is going away for a week so he needs my help packing. Thankfully our daughter doesn’t have any GCSE exams today. I seem to have spent all week running her and her friends to and from school for exams. Only two weeks to go and then a long wait for the results!
30/05/08
I know I’m always on about being busy but this week has been the busiest ever. I just haven’t stopped at all. I have posted off so many boxes that I’ve been called Father Christmas twice as I’ve staggered into my post office with sacks of parcels (I call it my post office because I’m in there so often, I get preferential treatment because I spend hundreds of pounds on stamps each month). It’s great to be so busy but I do think I have reached my limit as far as live stock goes. I feel like I’m running a one man zoo and I need to cut things down a little. It is quite a while yet until my two week summer holiday but I need to be sensible and start planning my cut back. I’m still not totally sure who will be helping maintain the bugs while I’m away as our son, who usually does it, is coming with us. My long suffering mother in-law will be house sitting and friends and neighbours will be given various jobs! I have loads of people who say that they would like to help but unfortunately none of them live anywhere near here.
My cut back on stick insects is going well. I certainly won’t be stopping them but I no longer have a dozen or so cages, I think it is probably about half that now and I am concentrating on the more popular species. I was really happy to get some Jungle Nymphs (Heteropteryx dilatata) in recently. I do hope this species isn’t dying out in captivity. They first came into the country in the early 1980’s, I was working at the London Butterfly House and we were amazed by them. It was so exciting to receive a shipment from Malaysia and see these huge apple green, spiky bugs. Occasionally we saw some yellow ones and not that infrequently mixed sex ones. These were male down one side of the stick insect and female down the other side. It was truly weird, especially as the female is huge and green, while the male is smaller, brown and has beautiful cerise wings. These part male part female Jungle Nymphs usually didn’t live long and of course they couldn’t breed. I thought the word was gyanomorph but I’ve just Goggled it and found nothing. It’s annoying me now, does anyone know what the correct word is? I think it is in Paul Brock’s stick insect book but I haven’t got time to check now!
I am always looking for ways to keep my various cockroach species in their boxes! Some of them are nearly impossible, they seem to get out through the smallest gaps and can climb the most slippery surfaces. I have tried smearing Vaseline around the rim of the boxes but unbelievably some do cross it and I also use Fluon which does work but is very difficult to apply and wears away quickly. It is a chemical that I gather always stays slightly sticky, it comes in a small bottle like Tippex. The brush in the bottle is so tiny and the liquid is so runny that it’s very to put on. I have almost eradicated the dreaded Surinam cockroaches from my bug house. They escaped and climbed into several other boxes and tanks where they happily set up camp until there were more of them than the original occupants. I do really like cockroaches, I’v always said that if I was to give up the bugs, I would always keep a few Hissing cockroaches. They are beautiful (I think) and amazing creatures.
Well better get dressed, showered and ready for the day, I generally get up, make a cup of tea and come straight into my office. A definite bonus of working from home.
I still haven’t named my beautiful Indonesian Pink Toe spider that I wrote about last week. I have put her in a nice tall tank and she is busy building an intricate web. I have a horrible feeling that she is about to moult, I just hope she doesn’t moult into a male. We did take some photos of her but I have no idea how to put it on here (I will try to get my husband to put it on over the weekend).
23/05/08
Well my baby girl is sixteen today, wow, that makes me feel old. It has been a week of birthdays in our family. It’s been such a hectic week with bugs and birthdays. Last weekend a friend of mine imported loads of beautiful bugs from Indonesia and I ended up with most of them! Then I went to the BTS (British Tarantula Show) show in Birmingham on Sunday and purchased a huge array of spiders, insects, scorpions, bush crickets and more, consequently I have been rushed off my feet housing, feeding and cataloguing all my new little friends. I have been up around 6.30am most days. Still, it’s been worth it as I’ve also had lots of orders and enquiries this week. I must just mention that probably over half of my customers email to let me know that their order has arrived safely. This is really nice, I’m always pleased to hear from happy customers. I know that Special Delivery is expensive but I think it’s vital when sending live bugs, having the parcel tracked is so important. It is very useful to be able to check up on individual parcels on the Royal Mail website. I cannot remember the last time that a parcel did not arrive the next day, the service has really improved.
You may have noticed that the Trap Door spider on my ‘Spiders and Tarantulas’ page is now marked as collection only. I decided that I just could not disturb her beautiful web. I have never had a Trap Door spider produce such an amazing structure and this week when I was feeding my multitude of spiders I dropped a cricket in her jar and she leapt out and grabbed it. It was so cute, I haven’t seen her for ages but she was obviously sitting in wait, I love this spider. I have decided to keep one of the spiders that came in from Indonesia, there was just one Pink Toe (Avicularia) and she is stunning. I can’t decide what to call her, any ideas? She’s black and fluffy with pretty pink toes, I don’t know which species but she is a stunning spider, she needs a pretty, girly name.
I am hoping that my husband will have time this weekend to take some more photos for my website. I have so many new bugs and although everyone can look them up on Google, I do like to have my own photos. I will try and put a photo of my pet Pink Toe on the Blog next week. Thankfully I already had some photos of the Indonesian beetles, they are truly magnificent. It would be great to breed them, one of the pretty Indonesian yellow jumping spiders came in with an egg sac, fingers crossed that it will hatch. These spiders are just so animated. I opened the lid on one of the boxes a couple of days ago and the spider was sitting sideways. It immediately turned around and faced me, looking up with it’s eight beady eyes. Although they are still quite small spiders (compared to tarantulas), they are huge for jumping spiders and very ‘fluffy’ and pretty. We definitely connected!
16/05/08
It is a whole year since I started my Blog! I only realised last week when I was deleting some of the pages. I have always left the first one on there and then I saw the date 18 th May 2007. So Happy Birthday Blog, it amazes me how many people read it each week. I thought I might cut it down to once a month or at least fortnightly but then I got so many requests to keep it weekly that I had to. It’s a bit of fun really, sharing my plans and moans and giving my customers an insight into how I work. So many people tell me how lucky I am doing this job and yes, playing with the bugs is great but the daily ‘running of a zoo’ on my own isn’t always easy. I get so little spare time, I am always busy, working from home and dealing with the needs of live animals is never ending. I am trying to carry out my plans to turn off the computer in the evenings and on a Sunday but it isn’t that simple. I have to work again this Sunday as I have so many things coming in. Since I had this great idea three weeks ago, I have actually worked two out of three Sundays!
Thankfully my problems with BT email addresses seem to have been sorted out, after several weeks of problems. I’m not sure if it was my husband’s emails to BT or my customer’s complaints to BT that finally resulted in them lifting the ban on me (I assume they had my address blocked as a spammer or some sort of potential threat to their customers). Anyway, thanks for your help in sorting it.
I have a busy week ahead with both work and home. I am expecting a lot of new bugs in over the weekend, spiders, beetles, scorpions, praying mantids, etc. and my daughter is now sitting her GCSE exams (she has one this morning). It is also her 16th birthday next week and my big sister’s 60 th (yes, she will love me advertising that fact on my website). I will be washing out boxes and tanks today in preparation for the new bugs and trying to make some space on the shelves. My bug house looks pretty big from the outside but I never have enough space. I had some more praying mantids hatch yesterday so they will need re-housing or they will start to gobble each other up (I love mantids but they do have some disgusting habits). I think I will have to finally give up on my Corn snake eggs and clean the box, they are definitely infertile, mum Kali is pretty old now. I have been hanging onto the eggs just in case.
I bought some Cuprinol wood treatment and an electric sprayer to re-treat my bug house this week but I don’t think that is about to happen any day soon. It took hours last time we did it with brushes so I am hoping it will be better and quicker with the sprayer. Perhaps I could get my daughter onto it in between exams, well it’s worth a try. I would like to paint the ceiling in my bug house. It is a light coloured wood but I’d love it to be white. Most bugs that escape in my shed go upwards, stick insects and praying mantids especially, it would be so much easier to spot them if the ceiling was white. The problem is that I couldn’t empty the bug house to do it and I am worried about poisoning my animals. I know there are low odour paints now but I’m not sure how toxic they would be to bugs. Does anybody know? Do you have experience of painting an animal room? I would be glad of any advice.
09/05/08
It’s been a really nice week, I have done a lot of gardening and outside things like tidying my bug house verandah and taking potted plants out of the greenhouse. The bramble patch is growing well, it seems daft to be lovingly tending a bed of brambles and pulling out the flowers but I am determined to become self sufficient. It drives me mad going out and collecting food for the stick insects, it seems to be never ending. The Eucalyptus trees that are dotted around the garden are growing strong, I just have to make sure that they don’t grow too tall and become unmanageable. I still have some in pots and they are doing well, they do take lots of watering though. The lettuces and other salad plants are coming up, they will feed the snails and millipedes.
Since returning from our few days in Cyprus I have decided that I need to have at least one day a week off. It drives my family mad that I’m always working so I am now having Sunday’s off. This means that I am not allowed to turn the computer on and therefore will not be replying to emails or sorting out orders. It is difficult because it also means that orders coming in over the weekend may not be able to go off on Monday morning but we will see how it goes. This weekend I am going to Devon on Saturday (family party), so I will be doing some work on Sunday, I have callers in the afternoon so I will need the computer on. I always have a lot of paperwork to get through and emails pop up all the time, it certainly isn’t all ‘playing with the bugs’.
A few weeks ago I was moaning about people placing orders and then not getting back to me to pay. It has got to such a stage that I am now keeping a ‘time wasters’ file. I am certainly not talking about people who spend ages deciding what they would like or people who ask lots of questions. I am only concerned with the people who send a complete order, often with their full details other than payment. I suspect that a lot of these people are ‘shopping with no money’ or they have decided at the last minute to buy elsewhere. Whatever the reason, I am now keeping records and copies of the emails (no, I won’t be publishing their names!) but I cannot keep taking items off of my site, only to find that two weeks later I have not received payment and I could have sold them to someone else.
I have an egg sac of the Vietnam Earth Tiger just hatching, the emerging nymphs look so cute, once they have moulted they will become proper spiderlings. These spiders came into the country as Ornithoctonus gadgil but I have renamed them as Haplopelma species, I think this is far more likely. According to Google the name does exist but I’m not so sure. It’s a real pain with spiders, they often come in with one name and turn out to be something else. It is especially difficult with young spiders but I can only do my best and after many years of experience I generally get it sorted out in the end. Tarantulas live for many years, they become real pets and part of the family. I’m sure this is why so many people want to come and choose their spiders, I have people visiting from all over the country these days. If you aren’t near enough to visit, the spider gallery on my site has photos of the actual spider that you will be buying – it’s the next best thing and a popular part of my website.
02/05/08
I know I’m always on about the weather but honestly it just hasn’t stopped raining this week! I’ve almost got washed away walking between my office at the side of the house and my bug house at the bottom of the garden and the leaks in my office roof have started up again. Other than that I’ve had a good week, everything seems to be breeding so I’ve spent lots of time ‘potting up’, I often think my work is akin to being a gardener. I’ve housed up baby mantids, baby spiders, baby millipedes etc. I do wish I knew the secret of how to get scorpions to actually give birth. I have Imperial, Asian Black, Desert Hairy and Flat Rock scorpions that are all obviously gravid but just won’t produce their young. I am in the process of re-housing these scorpions into taller tanks so that I can give them a deeper substrate. I am also experimenting with light. My bug house tends to be quite dark so I have set up some tanks with lights, I turn the lights on in the morning and off in the evening (I’m sure I’ve got a timer somewhere, must look for it later).
My email problems are ongoing and it doesn’t seem that I can do anything about it. Thankfully it only affects btinternet email addresses but very few of my emails are getting through to these people (BT don’t want to know). In desperation I have set up a new hotmail account, I say hotmail it says hotmail but the address is creepycrawlies@live.co.uk. I assume it’s owned by hotmail or they have been taken over. My internet is always being taken over, it was Easily, then Wanadoo and now it’s Madasafish and I think that’s all in the last year. I couldn’t get into my account last week because I only had Wanadoo log in details! I don’t intend to use the Live account unless I can’t reach a person any other way so please don’t email that address or I might not see it for ages. I am really trying to get into the habit of asking for everyone’s phone number.
Well, it isn’t raining as I look out of my window so I had better get out to my bug house and get some work done. I really need to clear things up as I have people visiting tomorrow. Perhaps next week I will tell you about my competitions, I love entering them but I love winning even more. I have just won a weekend at the British motorbike MotoGP at Donnington park in June, travel, accommodation, meals, entry to the paddock area, meet the team and more. No, I’m not into motorbikes but I know a man who is, my hubby is crazy about them and it’s lovely to win something for him - let’s face it, he does have a lot to put up with!
25/04/08
I had a lovely few days in Cyprus but I cannot believe that we spent so many hours searching and yet never saw a live, wild snake. I say live because we did find a dead one, a 5’ Whip snake dead on the road. My husband managed to pull off (a very fast road) but it was squashed. I thought if there was one, there may be more so I spent about half an hour poking around in the undergrowth. In the end hubby got so fed up with sitting in the car that he came and joined me. He shouted across that he had found a large piece of corrugated iron, I was very excited, everyone knows that reptiles like hiding under it. I shouted across “don’t touch it until I get there and he shouted back “I have no intension of touching it at all” but there was nothing anyway. We did see some beautiful lizards, a large centipede, lots of millipedes but again no praying mantis. Unfortunately Cyprus has very little water, the drought is hitting hard. I think all of the main rivers are dammed up and the lack of water is affecting wildlife, even at this time of year. Never mind it was fun looking (well I thought so) and we are going back again for two whole weeks in August. We are going with a big family group (16 weeks and counting).
Our teenage daughter didn’t do too badly looking after things at home although she did text me to say I hadn’t warned her how large some of the stick insects were and she had to have several attempts at putting new bramble in because she was so scared. I did ring and point out that they are leaf eating and completely harmless. She managed to spray everything morning and evening as per instructions so all my little mantids were ok. That’s a job for today, housing up mantids. I have been rearing up lots of fruit flies in film pots so now I need to house the African and Chinese nymphs individually or they will start to devour each other. I do find that Chinese mantids are particularly happy to eat their brothers and sisters!
I had a huge number of emails when I got back but I have managed to reply to them all now. You may have read on my site that I am having major problems with BT internet addresses, BT appear to have put me on their spam list. Hopefully my husband will be able to sort it out over the weekend, at the moment I cannot email any BT addresses and I don’t have everyone’s phone number, it is so annoying.
Did anyone go to the bug show at Kettering last Sunday? I didn’t know that it was on until we had already booked our trip. I was sorry to miss it but now I am wondering if it went ahead, nobody has mentioned it to me at all?
One last thing about Cyprus (if I’m boring you, you don’t need to read it). There is a small reptile park / rescue centre just outside Paphos, it is run by ‘Snake George’ and well worth a visit (costs about €3). He rescues snakes from all over the island and is very passionate about them. I had a great time holding all his baby snakes and the very rare, almost extinct Cyprus Grass snake. I didn’t touch the baby Blunt Nosed vipers, they looked very cute but I was told their venom is as strong as the adult’s. The young Coin snakes were absolutely beautiful.
11/04/08
I am inundated with livestock and panicking about leaving my ‘babies’ for a week (well 5 days) in Cyprus. Usually when I go away on holiday in the summer I spend months cutting down on stock but I thought that it was such a short time that it would be fine but now I’m wishing I’d been a bit more sensible! I have had new scorpions and spiders in this week and lots of mantids have hatched. I have been trying to write out instructions for my daughter to keep things ticking over but everything keeps changing. I would like to put all the animals that need spraying each morning and evening in the same part of the bug house but it just isn’t practical so I am going to put coloured stickers on the cages instead and just hope she can follow it! I will of course ring her each day (she’s been ringing me all this week telling me that she’s terrified of skiing, the food is rubbish and all the kids are younger than her – she’s on a school skiing trip to Italy – yesterday she rang and said she’s having a great time, just reminds me of the ‘Hello mother, hello father’ song from many, many years ago).
I can’t wait to get out to sunny (I hope) Cyprus. Last weekend I felt very sorry for myself collecting bramble for the stick insects under a blanket of snow. It may have looked very pretty but I thought my fingers were going to drop off. I should have collected the bramble on Saturday, I couldn’t believe all the snow when I woke up on Sunday. At least the new growth of bramble is coming through now. In the local woods I seem to compete with the deer for bramble during the winter.Deer must have very tough mouths to cope with the thorns.
Moan of the week, why do some people send me detailed orders by email and then never send the payment? I was speaking to a friend yesterday and she finds the same thing with her business. I cannot understand why somebody would take the time to go through my site, write out an order and then never contact me again. I’m not talking about enquires, I mean a proper order. I generally hang onto the goods for as long as I can and then email the person, but of course all I’ve got is an email address and sometimes postal address too and they just ignore me. I do think that some of these people are perhaps shopping with no money! I have heard on occasion “my PayPal account isn’t working” or “I’m having trouble with my card”, I assume this translates into I’ve no money in my account. It is very irritating, especially as these people have taken up my time asking questions by email, often several emails and as you all know by now – time is something that I never have enough of! Anyway that’s the end of my moaning, those of you who have spoken to me recently will know that I really want to see some wild snakes in Cyprus. I love snakes, my Corn snake Kali has been sitting in her nesting box for a week now, no eggs yet but I’m sure she will lay them soon.
No Blog next week but I will be telling you all about my trip the following week!
04/04/08
Another busy week has gone by, I’ve had praying mantis, spiders and lots of scorpions come in this week. I haven’t seen some of the scorpions before, the Yellow Skeleton species are especially nice, I hope to get some photos on the site soon. I sold my huge, adult female Salmon Pink spider, she is such a beautiful spider, I almost kept her but I really do have enough pets, so I had to be sensible.
I managed to lose my mobile phone a few days ago. I was in a total panic but thankfully I found it again. I took my dog Luka for a walk and when I got back I realised that my phone wasn’t in the holder on my belt. I always have my mobile clipped onto my belt. I ran back to the fields and retraced my steps, I have another mobile for my competitions (that’s another story) so I took it with me and rang my number. I couldn’t hear the phone ringing “Lily Allen – Alfie” but I kept trying. I met several other dog walkers and nobody had seen or heard it. I started to worry that somebody had picked it up but then I came across it. My phone was lying under the Privet hedge where I collect the food for my Black Beauty stick insects. I was so pleased, it was lying on top of the grass rather than in the mud, which was even better. What a panic, my mobile is my friend, what would I do without it? Most people call me on my mobile because they know I always have it with me. I keep thinking about giving up the landline but it doesn’t cost very much (we have a separate home line) and it is useful for the fax. Speaking of faxes, they seem to be dying out now that everyone has email. I used to receive loads of fax messages but these days I receive very few. They are often such poor quality that I can’t read them properly and end up calling the person to clarify their order anyway.
Hey, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t have a moan! Receiving post is sometimes such a pain, since last year’s strikes my post seems to be delivered anytime from 11am – 3pm. Many people are sending me items that need to be signed for and not telling me in advance. I am really lucky that my next door neighbours don’t mind taking in post for me but I do like to give them some warning. Unless you tell me in advance that you are sending it, I may not be here to sign. The door bell in my bug house is very temperamental, sometimes I am here but I don’t hear the bell. People frequently send orders by recorded delivery so that they can get their bugs quickly but our sorting office shuts before my post arrives so it will take a lot longer if it goes back to the depot. Even worse is when people send live bugs and don’t tell me when to expect them. Last year somebody sent some ‘live’ surplus stick insects to me without warning. They arrived while I was on holiday! Talking of holidays, my daughter is off skiing for a week tomorrow and when she gets back we are flying off to Cyprus for a five day break – I can’t wait.
28/03/08
Well I don’t think much of Spring! Snow all over Easter and now rain, I have water inside and out. My office is in a workshop built onto the side of our house and when it rains hard the water pools on the plastic roof and then finds it’s way in through any tiny crack. Unfortunately it rarely comes through the same place so I am listening for drips and moving the buckets around this morning. I would need to sell an awful lot of bugs to pay for a new roof. I will send my husband up there at the weekend to paint on some more waterproofing stuff, it works quite well, the roof will be covered in it soon!
I have a feeling that I’m going to be inundated with praying mantis nymphs any day now. I have several species of egg cases waiting to hatch. The first of my Chinese egg cases hatched yesterday. I have been breeding fruit flies in preparation and now have several jars full of them. I swallowed a fruit fly the other day and couldn’t stop coughing, I had to come in and get a glass of water. Not as yucky as swallowing a Bluebottle which has happened on occasion in my bug house. That’s the trouble with keeping praying mantids, although they will eat crickets they far prefer flies and flies do like to escape.
I have successfully rearranged my bug house over the last few weeks. I will be keeping more arachnids and less stick insects. I started off with stick insects and I will always have a soft spot for them (my first ones came from Harrods when I was about 7 years old) but they just take too much time and effort when I have them in such large numbers. I was sad to see my huge wooden cages go as my husband made them for me many moons ago. The net doors have been replaced several times over the years but the wooden structure never needed any repairs. I couldn’t get rid of them completely, I threw out the doors but I’m using the wooden frames as shelving in our garden shed. I will be keeping several different species but not the 25 or so that I had. My favourite stick insects have to be the Jungle Nymphs (Heteropteryx dilatata) but they seem to be in decline. I haven’t had any nymphs for some time now but I am trying to source some.
I have several visitors coming to look at the bugs today, which is always good but I had better go and have a tidy up first.
21/03/08
The first day of Spring at last. Sorry, no Blog this week, I have completely run out of time. My aunt is staying over Easter and various relatives will be popping in and out. I have just sneaked into my office while nobody is looking to update the site. Happy Easter everyone.
14/03/08
A busy week as usual, I have been trying to get the bug house cleared, cleaned and re-arranged before Easter next week. I have cut back on quite a few bramble eating, stick insect species and hope to sell more ‘mixed batches’. It is so much easier to feed them in a couple of large net Flexarium cages than a dozen smaller cages. I can tell most of the species apart but it is a job when they are small nymphs.
I have two moans for this week (I’m sure I could think of more if I tried), firstly it drives me mad when people send follow up emails without the original message. I get so many emails on a daily basis that I couldn’t possibly remember them all. I get emails that say “yes, I will have it” and I have to go back through my deleted emails to find what they were originally asking about. I get emails that say “that’s great” and I think, “well, so long as you’re happy”, I don’t have a clue! It is always nice though when people send emails to say that their order has arrived ok. My next moan is that I actually got bitten by a tarantula yesterday, I have never been bitten before! It was a very small tarantula, about 1” so perhaps it doesn’t count. I was packing up some Golden Starburst Baboon spiders for a shop called Cuddly Pets (honest) and the spider ran onto my hand, I grabbed it and held it against my wrist. I didn’t expect a spider that size to penetrate the skin but I felt a pin prick and then my wrist felt like I had touched stinging nettles. Looking back it really was nothing but I’m such a coward. I’m not scared of spiders but I am certainly scared of being injected with poison! I was instantly thinking anaphylactic shock. The nettle rash feeling lasted for a couple of hours and then wore off. It just reminded me of when I used to breed butterflies for schools, many years ago now. The Peacocks, Commas and Small Tortoiseshell larvae ate nettles so I would often snip them off with my gloves on but catch my arm as I did it. Oh well that will teach me to be more careful and at least I now know that I’m not allergic to spider bites. It’s weird that it should happen this week as I read that Calcium gluconate is useful for spider bites and I have been to several chemists to get some. None of them had it but Boots said they generally stock it, so I will definitely get some now just in case I get bitten by a ‘real’ spider.
Lastly I will only be posting on Monday and Tuesday of next week as Friday is a bank holiday. My worry is that if I posted on Wednesday and the parcel was held up it would then not arrive until Saturday and then of course being such a worrier I think, if it didn’t arrive on Saturday it wouldn’t arrive until Tuesday because Monday too is a Bank holiday. Anyway it’s only one week until Spring and Easter which sounds good to me!
06/03/08
March at last, nearly spring time! I noticed this morning that there is new growth on the bramble, not enough to be munched by the stick insects yet but it won’t be long. The trouble with new bramble leaves is that they always seem to be covered in greenfly. It’s a real problem in my bug house, I find all I can do is wash them off.
I had a nice restful Mother’s Day, makeup from my daughter and the ‘promise’ of a box of chocolates from my son, he forgot to buy them! One of my regular customers popped over on the Saturday to buy his mum a present, a tub of cockroaches to feed her geckos! I hope she liked them.
It’s been another busy week, I have lots of new bugs arriving today, spiderlings from a super breeder in Europe and baby centipedes, scorpions, yet more spiders from a supplier in this country. I also have a girl coming over to swap millipedes, she has been very successful at breeding and has juveniles of several species. I must ask what her secret is. I find that most giant millipedes mate but never seem to produce eggs. Perhaps I am disturbing them too much, keeping them too warm, perhaps it is something to do with their food. Millipedes all seem to like rotting leaves but some eat mostly fruit, others rotten wood and I like to give mine mushrooms occasionally, I understand that some eat fungus in the wild. Millipedes are nice ‘friendly’ bugs, different species generally live happily together and they can be kept with cockroaches and fruit eating beetles. The biggest problem with them is that they often burrow away during the day and only come out after dark. Millipedes are popular with schools as the children love to watch them moving along on all their legs. The legs seem to move in a wave (yes, I think they look fascinating too, they never seem to trip over with all those legs). The Giant Train millipedes are by far the most popular pet millipedes, they grow to a huge size and tend to stay on the surface most of the time. I am really pleased to have juveniles at the moment, alas I didn’t breed them myself.
Well I’m off for a cup of tea and a sit down before the postman arrives with all my goodies.
29/02/08
It’s spiders, spiders everywhere this week! I had an order arrive in the post on Thursday morning and then picked up a collection of spiders on Thursday evening. I can’t move in my bug house for boxes and tanks but I do intend to get them all sorted over the weekend. The spiders that I picked up are mostly huge adults and they are all in great condition, unfortunately somebody needed to sell them in a hurry as they could no longer keep them. There is an adult Goliath Birdeater, Salmon Pink, King Baboon and several others. Hopefully we will get time over the weekend to photograph them for the web site (if you want to see them you are welcome to pop in tomorrow, give me a call to arrange a time).
My internet provider will be carrying out ‘essential maintenance work’ on Saturday evening until Sunday evening so I will be without emails during this time. An enforced Mother’s Day off perhaps! About 18 months ago I had terrible problems with my emails and had to switch to a proper business provider, it is expensive but I need reliable internet access. It was a horrible time, somebody, somewhere in the world was sending out masses of emails (a shares scam) and it looked as if they were from me as they had copied my web address. I needed a system that could distinguish the difference between me and the spamming company as most of my genuine emails were being blocked by spam filters. It is a big problem according to online forums and one that often ruins small businesses. Luckily I survived but it was six months until the bogus emails stopped and normal business could resume. Our internet provider at the time was useless as their call centre was in India and if you go ‘off topic’ they are stumped.
Right I’m off to sort spiders now but I will be going out a bit later to visit someone else’s bug house. He doesn’t keep spiders but he does have many interesting creepy crawlies, it will be good to look and not have to do anything with them.
22/02/08
That week went quickly, it seems like yesterday since I wrote last week’s Blog. It’s been another busy week, lots of bugs coming and going. I have just taken delivery of a large box containing some very interesting animals, Land Hermit crabs (I haven’t had any for ages), Madagascan Fire millipedes (I haven’t had any for years!) and huge centipedes. I do think giant centipedes are fascinating but they are probably the most scary creatures that I keep. It takes ages for me to pack them up for posting. They are really tricky to get into a tub, even a large tub, they seem to rear up from both ends in a very threatening manner and their movements are erratic, they dash one way and then without warning shoot around the other way. I usually clear out my big bin to sort them in but it often takes several attempts before I finally get the monster in the box.
People often ask me how many times I’ve been bitten and stung. Happily I’ve never been stung by a spider or scorpion and certainly not by a centipede either. I have been bitten and nipped frequently by non venomous bugs and my hands are always full of bramble thorns! The only thing that I have been stung by was an Assassin bug and it hurt like hell for about an hour and then went off. I was stung on the tip of my finger and it felt just like an intense burn. It was a couple of years ago now but I still remember that I got no sympathy. I rang my husband at work who growled down the phone that he was in a meeting so I growled back that he should have turned his phone off and then I rang my niece, who’s an ambulance driver. She just said ‘oh that’s interesting, does it hurt and how do you treat that?’ I told her that she was the ambulance person and I was hoping that she would tell me. In the end I had a cup of tea, a bar of chocolate and a good moan to myself. I have had many near misses with spiders but like most animals they don’t really want to take on something far larger than themselves, they generally threaten and then run away. Most animals will only fight when they are cornered.
Oh well, I had better get back out to the bug house and sort my ‘box of goodies’.
15/02/08
Well last week may have gone smoothly and I ticked all the jobs on my ‘tick list’ but this week has been manic. So many jobs have gone undone and I don’t have a single day with more than half the ticks! I have received quite a lot of new spiders (spent all day yesterday housing and feeding them) and praying mantis egg cases. Due to my special offer on small spiders I have sold a huge number this week and yes – at last people are buying the praying mantids that I have been lovingly looking after for far too long.
Now for my weekly whinge, it must be almost a year since I tried to eradicate Surinam cockroaches from my bug house. I stopped selling them when I realised that they made lousy food for spiders and other carnivores. Before the spider could catch the cockroach it had burrowed away, never to be seen again. I cannot believe that I am still finding them in my tanks and boxes. One of my jobs for the weekend is to clean out my huge glass tank. I had it made years ago for my Jungle Nymph stick insects. It is a very tall tank so it won’t be easy. The reason that this job has become urgent is that I didn’t initially notice that my Wood Nymph eggs had stopped hatching. Now I’m pretty sure that the cockroaches have been eating them. I turned over the top layer of the substrate and found it teeming with Surinam cockroaches. There are still some in with my millipedes – will I ever get rid of them?
Can I just add a quick note about mistakes on my site. If you find a spelling mistake or a photo not opening please do let me know. It really is very helpful, some people think they will sound critical but not at all. It is difficult to proof read your own work, things do go wrong and cut and paste can mess things up at times. I know some of the print sizes differ but I don’t seem to be able to sort this, Dream Weaver that we use for my site, seems to have a mind of it’s own when it comes to the print on some pages.
08/02/08
Thanks for your cards and birthday best wishes, I had a really nice day last Sunday. I cannot think of anything particularly eventful bug wise this week. I have a sheet that I print out with daily jobs on it, I call it my ‘tick list’. Each day I tick off the jobs that I have managed to get done and I then review it at the end of each week. This week I am delighted and amazed that I have actually ticked all the jobs, on every day, a sure sign that I am finally catching up after taking time off over Christmas and New Year. It certainly helps that the weather has been mainly dry this week and that the evenings are getting lighter. Quite a few of my jobs are outside. I have many food plants for the bugs planted in my garden. My Eucalyptus trees are pretty tall now so I will have to keep a check on those this year. I hate to keep lopping the tops off but I can’t let them grow beyond my reach! Several stick insects eat Eucalyptus and I really like the smell. My evergreen Oak trees are about 4’ now, pretty good as they take years to grow. We have been in our house for five years in June. I do love the country but in London I had a Post Office around the corner from my house, an underground station just a short walk away and I only had to dash to the corner of the road for a bar of chocolate! Mind you I did have to get the car out and drive to collect bramble and the bramble prickles did damage my car boot and scratch the paintwork.
I think I have mentioned ‘Google Alerts’ before. I receive free info each week in an email. It is a good way to see snippets of forums and what people are saying about me. It’s really nice because all of it seems to be positive. The following was in my latest Google Alert.
Virginia Cheeseman Breeder Feedback. ... Got a really nice book off
of Virginia, and also a lot of other superb stock in the past. A1 breeder! ...
Sometimes the information is pretty old, I’m not quite sure why, but I could pay and receive a more in depth report (probably a good idea). Talking of good ideas, I am unsubscribing from Facebook today. It really isn’t for me, I don’t fully understand it, I only signed up so that I could read the profile of a customer, who had sent me a link and asked me to join. Since then I have had loads of people wanting to be my ‘friend’ and writing on my wall? I don’t even know where my wall is? Anyway I’m always full of new ideas and not all of them particularly good ones!
01/02/08
Another week nearer to Spring.... I seem to have spent a lot of the week ‘Spring cleaning’, I have so many boxes and jars to wash on a regular basis and this week I have been cleaning out some of my larger boxes and tanks. The only way to clean them properly is in the bath. It’s quite a job to manoeuvre them around and not soak the floor. It really annoys the family when I leave bits of mud and leaves in the bath so I have to make sure I clean the bath thoroughly afterwards. My husband has threatened to install a sink in our workshop at the side of the house but I’ve told him I wouldn’t use it. The workshop is cold and dirty, I’m waiting until we do up the kitchen and get a dish washer, I will be able to wash all the jam jars from the stick insect cages and all the water bowls in it (when hubby is at work & daughter at school). At the moment I have a baby steriliser set up in the kitchen for all the smaller items and they never stop complaining that it’s in the way.
Bug breeding is still going well on the whole. My Zebra spiders failed to mate but I think it could be that one is a fully mature male with obvious mating hooks and I have a feeling that my ‘adult female’, is in fact an immature male. The spider does have suspiciously long legs. I have some Chile Beauty spiderlings just hatching which is great and the stick insects are popping out of their eggs in abundance. Luckily I am not having any problems collecting bramble. Often at this time of the year the bramble is looking very tatty but we haven’t really had any long cold spells this winter. I know that the winter isn’t over yet and we often have snow in February and sometimes March. It’s my birthday on Sunday (21 again!), I’m hoping that it will be a nice sunny day, like today.
Must get on now, we took our daughter to Henley College for her sixth form interview this morning. She has been offered a place, which is great, now she just needs to pass all her GCSE’s and match her predicted grades!
First One18/05/2007
Hi everyone, I have never written a Blog but it seems like a good idea as lots of people email me and seem interested in what I do, of course if you aren’t interested you don’t need to read it! I intend to write a new page each week and just say what’s been going on with the bugs and life in general. Those of you who already know me personally will know that I never stop moaning so there are bound to be lots of moans in my Blog. I think in this first entry I should tell you a bit more about myself. I hate to mention age but it always crops up. I am 48, I’ve been married forever (30 years) and I have a son of 29 (moved out ages ago), a daughter of 14 (will probably never move out). I have always loved bugs, but really I love all animals. I seem to especially like the animals that other people have phobias about, spiders, snakes, rats, bats etc.
I always had lots of pets as a child and teenager and then I went to work at the London Butterfly House in Syon Park, Brentford. The park opened in 1980 and I was there from the start, it was a dream job for me, I only worked part time as my son was young. I think it is so sad that the London Butterfly House is to close this Autumn and in it’s place will be a huge hotel. I worked at the Butterfly House for a few years and then started up my postal business from home and I’ve been going ever since. The internet has transformed my business over the last few years, I don’t know how I ever managed with paper catalogues and relying on ‘snail mail’ and the phone. Things haven’t changed that much though, I’m still working alone from home and none of my family are remotely interested in bugs, or animals of any sort. I’ve tried to get them involved but they won’t have it. My daughter is even scared of worms, how stupid is that?
Anyway enough about me (for this week), I’m off to the British Tarantula Exhibition this weekend and no doubt I will have some lovely new spiders and other bugs on my site next week. I don’t exhibit at shows anymore, I just don’t have the time, it is so much nicer to buy new animals and chat to people – yes I love chatting. It is really good to put faces to people that I have only spoken to on the phone or by email. I will have a large name badge on so feel free to introduce yourself. Well I think that’s it for now, I don’t want to run out of things to say next week– as if!