Virginia Cheeseman Blog

An uneventful week, bug wise. I've had a busy week personally and due to my cold and feeling very unwell for a few days I still have some catching up to do. I was working in the bug house until 9pm yesterday, I just thought right, I have got to get to grips with this week's feeding rota or the week will be over! I'm glad I put in the time because I do feel a bit calmer today. My hubby took a couple of days off to help but quite honestly there is little he can do to help with my work. Still he comes in very handy running his mum to hospital appointments, walking the loony dog and making endless cups of tea (which I live on). We are off to a spider show on Sunday, it was very good last year so I am hoping it is as good this year. I wish it was a bit closer to where we live. I will be more careful than usual about what I buy, sales have picked up a little but are way down on this time last year. I have found that spider sales especially are down. I have bought in a great deal...

Onwards and upwards. I have had a few more orders this week (thank you) but I now have the most horrible cold and feel pretty grotty. I had a number of new bugs arrive this week. The Malaysian Katydids have proved extremely popular so I will be looking at getting some more bush crickets. I really love them but they are quite time consuming, they do need proper care and feeding. I will be getting some more spiders next week and I am on the look-out for more millipede species. I have kept some adults back, of various species to try and breed, it would be good to get more captive bred millipedes. Some beautiful millipedes are regularly imported into the UK but few of them seem to breed. I would love to breed the Giant Train millipedes this year but firstly I need to source some reasonably priced adults. The price of millipedes has increased over the last couple of years but I need to buy at a reasonable price in order to sell them out again. Hence the idea of trying to breed more of my ow...

How honest should I be? What a dreadful week, barely an order in sight. It's been one of those weeks when I've considered popping down to Tesco to ask for a job but then I saw in the paper today that yesterday £5bn was wiped off the value of Tesco due to losses over Christmas. I think they are doing even worse than me! Apart from not making any money, everything else is going well. I was delighted to find that my pretty Violet Tree spider's egg sac has produced lots of babies and my second one has an egg sac yet to hatch. I 'think' my Golden Starburst Baboon spider is fully adult so I intend to introduce her to the male this weekend. Fingers crossed it will go ok, they are not the friendliest of spiders. I won't be sticking my hand in with them if things go wrong but I will be standing by with the plastic tumbler to pop on top of either spider if necessary. I have been working on several ideas that I had before Christmas. If you are reading this blog then you ha...

Happy New Year Everyone! I had a lovely break over Christmas and New Year, it was well worth cutting down on livestock before the festivities. I had a very family orientated Christmas, lots of kids events " oh yes there was" and family parties. This week it is very much back to work. I have been frantically feeding, cleaning, moving tanks around and generally organising everything for all the new animals that I have coming in. Yesterday I collected some scorpions, spiders, beetles and unidentified cockroaches from a reptile dealer friend of mine. I know it is weird (my husband constantly tells me) but I do like cockroaches. These ones are very similar to the Porcelain cockroach. I did some searching on Google last night, wouldn't it be great if they were a new species and then they could be named after me? I would love to have a bug named after me, there are so many, as yet unidentified species in the world. It has to be more realistic than hoping to win the lottery! I a...