Virginia Cheeseman Blog

Postage is increasing substantially next month, I had an email a couple of days ago from Royal Mail showing the new Special Delivery rates. I am not increasing my postal charges immediately but I cannot imagine that I will be able to hold the price once the Winter comes around again. The new rates mean that I will be out of pocket on most orders that I send. It really annoys me because Special Delivery is exactly what was once called 'first class post'. Royal Mail only guarantee that they will deliver the next day before 1pm, this is just what first class mail used to be, in fact I remember when my post arrived before 7.30 am. I am lucky now if it arrives before lunch time. If a parcel is delayed all that is refunded is the postage - big deal! That said almost all my parcels do arrive on time and I very rarely have anything arrive damaged. This is the first week of 2012 that I haven't had to enclose a single heat pack in my parcels. It has been a lovely warm week and the b...

Spring at last, the sun is shining and all is well in the bug world. I have written my third newsletter which will 'hopefully' be going out today to everyone who subscribes. I say hopefully because we have had to use a new system, due to the old one crashing my site last time! (too many customers, the server saw it as junk mail - how dare they!). I have had an extremely busy week with things constantly coming and going. Next weekend I will be attending a bug show and I have pre-ordered several species of millipede, among them the Giant Train (at last) and some more of the very popular Yellow Spotted Flat millipedes. If you have any particular requests for animals please let me know and I will look out for them. The bulk cockroaches are continuing to sell well. It was certainly a good idea to sell them 50 at a time but some are far easier to pack than others. I have thought about selling them by weight rather than individuals but I suppose that defeats the object. Some people ...

I'm back, sorry about the lack of blogging last week. Life is just so hectic at the moment and last Friday my hubby took a day off work to help me with everything so I couldn't really devote a couple hours to my blog as I generally do on a Friday morning. I was going to put a note on the site explaining that but even to me, it just looked like a whinge! I would love to say I am more on top of things now, but I would be lying. I have had quite a few new bugs in this week and I have a lot of captive bred spiderlings arriving later today. I do seriously need to look at what I'm doing, I clearly have too many little animals for one person to care for. I cut out praying mantids last year and I think it is now time to cut down on stick insects, they take a huge amount of looking after. I am certainly not intending to cut them out, just reduce the species that I keep and therefore cut down on the number of cages. The bramble is budding at last but it will still be a few weeks unti...

A sunny start to the month, hopefully the bramble and other food plants will begin to grow again soon. The recent snow has killed off a lot of the bramble in my area and all the little stick insects are hatching out at once. I have quite a few 'fat' Hissing cockroaches so I expect to have babies soon. It amazes me that they are kept warm all year round, I have lights on during the day and yet they only seem to produce young in the Spring. I have sold the last of the Tok-Tokkie beetles and sure enough there are larvae of various sizes in the substrate. They are similar to mealworms, it would be good to see them complete their lifecycle as I know very little about them. I bought in several species of millipedes this week, most have been captive bred but some are a little small to offer for sale at the moment so I will probably hold onto them until they have grown a bit. I have also bought in a few new spiders. Work has again been very busy, I do feel like I live my life on a tre...