Two weeks to catch up on.

Two weeks to catch up on. All is well in the bug house and I am in the process of building up my animals again as the school holidays will soon be over. I now have a large stock of Giant Train millipedes, it would be great to get these breeding. I checked on my Ghana Fire Red baby millipedes a couple of days ago and they are looking good. They are still in the 'white nymph' stage but they are munching away on leaves so they should moult and grow into proper little millipedes soon. I nearly came a cropper checking on them as I pulled two boxes off the shelf together, the boxes were extremely heavy and unfortunately one slid off the other and hit me full on the nose. My nose made a very loud crack and I thought I had broken it, luckily it wasn't broken but it is a bit sore. I will certainly take them down one at a time in the future!

I have some nice Brachypelma spiders arriving today, they will go on the site a little later. I am once again writing this blog a day early as I am off to Cadbury World with my nephew's family tomorrow. We still have tickets to use up from all my competition wins and Friday is the day when I can't send out orders so it is the ideal day to take off. My husband is working all over the bank holiday so I will catch up on everything then. I obviously won't be able to send out anything until Tuesday. I really don't like bank holidays, they just mess up my week! I only send orders outside the UK on a Monday and Tuesday so that they reach their destination before the weekend, not having the Monday to post is a real pain. I think my European orders are keeping me going at the moment, Finland and Denmark seem to be my main customers. I am assuming that I get mentioned on Scandinavian forums but whatever it is I'm delighted. Sales have been really low during July and August, I know things will pick up in September but it is hard to keep motivated when caring for my menagerie every day and making so little money.

I have lots of plans a foot, firstly I think my website needs updating and it sounds like money well spent to get a new package that will really improve my site. I need to work out an incentive for people to mention me on forums. I get a very large number of emails saying how pleased people are with my work, it would be great if these comments were made public. I really don't have the time to get onto forums, Facebook, Twitter or any other social media platforms but I am well aware how important they are these days. There really is only one of me and only so much that one person can do.

I went to the Reptile exhibition at Kempton park last Sunday. It was great to see so many captive bred reptiles, if only more pet bugs were captive bred. In my opinion there are still way too many bugs and spiders brought in from the wild. The show was good, there were lots of interesting things to see but it was most certainly the smelliest show I have ever been to. The show was packed with people, it was boiling hot and I think the smell was a combination of human sweat and snake poo. It was most unpleasant and I certainly felt for the exhibitors stuck in there behind their tables. I picked up a few new spiders, snails etc but it was very much a reptile show. I heard quite a few people shriek when they saw tarantulas on a table. It wasn't like the bug shows that I generally go to but it was very interesting to look around. If you read my blog regularly you will know that I do love snakes. There were some stunning baby snakes and of course some larger ones too.

Must speed up now as I am aware that time is getting on and I have lots to do as I won't be here tomorrow. I had a go at mating some of my spiders last week. I was pleased to see that my male Cameroon Baboon clearly wasn't 'past it' as he made a bee line for the female and they certainly appeared to mate ok. Just as well as he is not a very friendly spider and clamped onto my tweezers with his fangs as I tried to encourage him out of his box. I certainly didn't want to interfere with the mating process. I also put my male New Mexican spider with an adult female but neither spider showed any interest in each other. I am now wondering if the female is not yet fully mature. I will probably introduce him to my other female over the weekend. It is so difficult to know when a tarantula is fully mature, with the male it is generally obvious as most have mating hooks and they often change their entire look upon the final moult. With females it is far more difficult to tell as they just get larger! It is not completely beyond the realms of possibility that my 'females' are immature males but I really don't think so as they are large and bulbous. Time will tell but I will certainly cry if all three turn out to be male! I am constantly having people ring and tell me that their 'guaranteed' female spider (not sold by me) has moulted into an adult male. I don't know why people are so surprised, if you push to know the sex, you are very likely to be told it is a female as that is what everyone wants. These pet shop people have a 50/50 chance of being right, I am always honest and say "I cannot tell". If I do know the sex, it will be stated in the information on my website. I know I lose orders this way because some people tell me they only want to buy a female - well good luck with that one!

That's it, I can't type any faster (with my one finger) and I need to get out and sort the couple of orders that I do have. I hope everyone has a nice bank holiday weekend, the sun is shining here at the moment!