Some nice sunny weather this week, shame it always seems to be during the week when everyone is working. I am going to an animal show tomorrow and the forecast is rain. I went to the Kettering bug fair last Sunday, I bought some great new bugs but there seemed to be far less exhibitors and visitors than previous years. There was a guy at the show who breeds giant beetles, he had a fantastic display. I bought some Rainbow stag beetle larvae, the adults were beautiful, brightly coloured with an iridescent sheen. Unfortunately there wasn't a huge range of tarantulas and there were no bargains to be had. I expected to get some new praying mantids but the prices were too high for me to sell on. I did get some Jungle Nymph stick insects, they were top of my shopping list (yes, I do take a shopping list to the shows). I went a bit mad and bought them from several exhibitors as I haven't had them for ages. The result was that when I sorted out my accounts the next day I had spent nearly £150 on them! I need to start selling some to recoup my outlay but I certainly do want to keep enough to get them breeding again. It is a long term project as they are much longer lived than other stick insects and consequently take months to mature and the eggs take a year or more to hatch.
You may have noticed that my website has changed around a bit the last few days. My husband has been 'improving' it, I was not impressed when he took all the colour out of it yesterday. I made him put some colour back but he has convinced me that it needs some updating. We will have to get together and look at the site, I have had many people offer to rearrange my website but I hate change and have always said a polite no, perhaps the time has come to say yes. The trouble is that I want to keep my site personal, it is only me and I don't want it to look like a commercial company. The other thing is that I need to update it at least once a day and at the moment, with the program that we use, it is really easy. I am a technophobe (thick, with no interest in computers), if I had a more professional website I may find it difficult to manage. One thing that would help though is for people to let me know when they find a mistake on my website. This week I realised that I had the same spider listed twice and that the link to the Hissing cockroach photograph had disappeared. I don't know how long the photo had been missing but it could have been ages, nobody had mentioned it and I only noticed when someone enquired about the colour of the cockroaches and I clicked on the link myself. I know that people don't want to offend me but it would be really helpful to let me know if you find a mistake anywhere.
Did anyone hear me on the radio last Tuesday?? I was on the George Lamb show BBC - 6 Music. They tell me that they have millions of listeners but I haven't heard from one of them! The show rang me up and asked if I would mind answering some questions on stick insects. It was fun and they let me mention my website so I expected to be super busy afterwards. I gather it can be listened to on BBC iPlayer for a week, I won't be listening myself. Goodness knows what I ended up saying, it was all off the top of my head, there were no rehearsals and I didn't know what they were going to ask me. The radio people seemed happy and George Lamb sounded nice so that's good enough for me. I keep thinking about applying for Absolute radio's 'Little Business of The Week' with Christian O'Connell.
On the spider front, my beautiful Mexican Red Knee, Stephanie has moulted. She looks even more stunning than before but it does mean no babies for her. I had been leant a male Mexican Red Knee before Christmas and although I didn't observe a mating I had hoped that during the night they may have got it together but alas it seems not and once the tarantula has moulted the sperm is lost, so no patter of hundreds of tiny feet for her. I have also decided to rename the Zebra spider, I am now calling it the Guatemala Blue. I am assured that the spider is Aphonopelma seemani but that the spiders collected in Guatemala lack the stripes of the ones collected in Costa Rica. The Aphonopelma seemani spider used to have pretty black and white markings but I haven't seen them for ages. The ones that are available these days are still nice, active, spiders but they lack the markings and it seems daft to call them the Zebra tarantula.
I am hoping that my hubby and I will get time to photograph the new bugs from the show over the weekend and put them on the site. The spider gallery is going well but each time I sell a spider from the gallery we need to take a new photo of the next one, as the gallery is obviously of that specific spider and not just representative of the species. I have some beautiful new Flat millipedes from the Philippines, without identification I certainly need to get a photo of them on the site.
I'm glad it isn't raining today, I need to collect some more rotten wood for my beetle larvae. It is bad enough walking along with a log in my arms in the sunshine but when it's wet, I look really daft, but most of my neighbours are used to me by now.
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