Virginia Cheeseman Blog

Never enough room in my bug house, I have been having a sort out and trying to make some space. This week hasn't been as hectic as last week so I have been rearranging the boxes and tanks and trying to get some sense of order so that the feeding and cleaning regime is a little simpler. I do of course have my famous 'tick list' so that nothing gets left out. I have lists for everything, I wouldn't know what to do with myself without my daily lists. The Indonesian centipede eggs have hatched but rather disappointingly there were only a dozen babies. I thought they generally had a lot more than that? They are large, healthy babies and seem to be eating ok, their heads are bright blue. I have separated them into individual pots, having never bred them before I am not sure how cannibalistic they are. They may be fine together but I didn't want to risk it. Spiderlings are often fine together until they start moulting but newly hatched praying mantids can be very cannibal...

Spiders, spiders everywhere - I have had a delivery of spiders almost every day this week and I now have a bug house full of them. I had a large number come in yesterday afternoon, they have all been housed and fed but I haven't had time to enter their details on the website yet. I think it will be pretty busy today. I generally spend time on Fridays catching up with paperwork because there is no posting to do before the weekend. As I sit here now looking out onto my lovely garden (I think it's lovely) and the sun is shining I want to get out there but it will have to wait until tomorrow. I haven't checked the weather forecast but it will probably be raining. It has been another hectic week, my husband was away with work, I have managed to add several jobs to his 'to do list' in his absence. Sadly it looks like he will be spending a second weekend trying to fix our daughter's, boyfriend's car. It needs repairing as it is conked out on our drive at the momen...

Back from holiday for one week but it's been a very long week. I think I need another holiday now. I have caught up on all emails and correspondence, posted out everything that was ordered while I was away and placed orders for a great deal of new stock. Yesterday I received several species of spiders, scorpions, millipedes etc and next week I have even more coming in. My husband has had the last couple of days off work and has been constantly making up little spider houses. The volume of email enquiries that I receive is getting a bit out of hand. Many of them are queries that are answered on either my FAQ page or terms page. Many are simply too complicated to answer in an email but are very quickly dealt with on the phone. I have been trying to persuade people to call with their enquiries but it is an uphill struggle. It seems that people who don't suffer from arachnophobia commonly suffer with phone-phobia (I'm sure there is a name for it, another thing to Google). Some ...

I'm back from sunny Rhodes and very pleased to see that it is still sunny and quite warm in the UK. The holiday was lovely, not the most relaxing with 8 children under 8 in our family party of 20 but great fun. I did a lot of bug hunting with the kids, we went out around the hotel and surrounding areas with our torches most evenings (my evening bag will never be the same again with half a dozen torches stuffed into it). We found several praying mantids, I'm not sure of the species but the males were much smaller than the females (I will do a Google search later). We found various grasshoppers, bugs, crickets and some beautiful Swallowtail butterflies, plus there were lots of Humming Bird hawk moths around the flower pots in the hotel. I tried to take some photos but they certainly move fast as they dart from one flower to the next. We also saw lots of lizards but sadly no snakes. My hubby and I hired a car for three days and went out on regular 'snake hunts', we walked ...