Virginia Cheeseman Blog

Half term and another bank holiday have meant that this week has been very slow for orders. Hopefully next week will see a change as I am inundated with new stock from the recent BTS show and I seriously need to clear some ASAP! I have massively reduced all my male tarantulas today, sadly they are of no use to me as I don't have any corresponding adult females. I was however delighted to see that one of my Tanzanian Blonde Baboon spiders had moulted into a male this week. Some of you may have seen the photo on Facebook of the pair. I will attempt to mate them next week so fingers crossed I'm successful. Not only have I got a lot of stock from the exhibition but my own animals seem to be rapidly reproducing at the moment. I had another Asian Forest scorpion give birth this week and I have plenty of spiderlings, millipedes, cockroaches, grasshoppers etc. etc. I won't be around tomorrow as I am taking my sister to Tiggywinkles. The trip was already planned but it was a st...

An eventful week. It was the British Tarantula society's annual show last Sunday, the society's 30th anniversary and of course I have been around since the beginning when Ann and Frank Webb set it up. The show was great, obviously a lot of hard work had gone into it, it was much better this year as the exhibition was held on the ground floor of the football stadium, rather than upstairs. I really enjoyed the show but couldn't stay until the end, I would like to have been there for the judging of exhibits but had to get home and sort out my new purchases and believe me there were a lot of new purchases! I finally finished adding all the stock to my website yesterday and I intend to finish housing all the animals up properly today (they have been fed and watered but need to go into more spacious homes). I'm so glad that I checked on everything when we got back as some twit (I would happily call him that to his face if I knew who he was) had packed up his animals in airt...

A great holiday but now I am back to the usual chaos! Too much to do and not enough time to do it. I am writing this blog a day early because I have so much on tomorrow, however I am also cooking tea for my nephew's girls who I have every Thursday after school. I have spent hours feeding my large spiders today and I really do have some beauties. I am finally getting a bit more into Facebook and I can see it's great potential. Whenever I manage to post a photo it always gets lots of views, comments and interest. I say 'manage' as I have had some mishaps along the way. In Cyprus last week I posted a nice photo of the Swallows in their nest on the terrace but it didn't appear, I assume I didn't save it? The Swallows were everywhere and must have eaten a ton of mosquitoes but I still came home with several bites. The hotel is very eco friendly, there were loads of great bugs around. We saw numerous praying mantis, the amazing Mole cricket invasion (that I did post...