Virginia Cheeseman Blog

Sales are picking up now (thank goodness). Pre-Christmas is an awful time for my work, the orders dry up and I’m left looking after a multitude of animals that are reproducing but going nowhere! This week I have received several orders from schools and from people who visit schools with their animals. I’m a day late with the blog as the week has been very difficult on a personal level. I can honestly say that this is the saddest January I have ever experienced. All around me seems to be ill health and friends and family needing my help. I haven’t even had time to go in the gym and that is pretty desperate as it is my sanctuary where I generally retreat to at least every other day. I even got a call from the gym yesterday asking where I was! The bugs are mostly doing fine but my beautiful Burma Chocolate Brown tarantula appears to have eaten her egg sac. I searched the vivarium a couple of days ago thinking it may have hatched and hoping to see a flurry of tiny spiderlings but all I fou...

No blog today but I hope to find time to write it tomorrow! It's been a busy week both work and personal and I sadly have to be elsewhere today but I will make every effort to write my "weekly whinge" in the morning.

Snug as a bug, well at least my mini zoo is happy in it’s well insulated bug room. It is freezing (literally) outside now. I suppose it had to happen, I know it’s winter but I was thinking we could just coast along, enjoying the mild weather until the spring. I just hope we don’t have any more power cuts, evidently the recent one was due to a pheasant flying into an electricity cable. I have spent quite a bit of time in my warm bug room this week and everything is looking pretty good. I am trying hard to concentrate on what I’ve got and get everything sorted before I restock at the end of the month. I just seem to have so many animals and of course they all have their different needs. It would be so much easier if I just had one or two types of bugs, say spiders and scorpions or all stick insects or all millipedes but as you know I have a huge range. Oh well ‘variety is the spice of life’ as they say. I was pleased to discover over Christmas that my Burma Chocolate Brown female is carr...

Happy New Year! This is my first blog of 2016, I do hope that everyone had a great Christmas and I for one am now looking forward to the spring (10 weeks and 2 days – but who’s counting). It has been a very mild winter so far but today we have frost and the temperature has dropped considerably, as you all know by now I hate the cold. The bugs are all doing well, I have been sorting things out in the bug room over the festive break. I had a very good breeding year in 2015, I did especially well with scorpions and now have several species as juveniles. I have cleaned out and set up new colonies of many of my cockroach species. I will be gradually restocking in January as orders start to increase once Christmas is over. Honestly, I might as well give up in November and December, sales are always terrible but I still have to care for and maintain my menagerie. I am having a rethink on what to do next winter, a long holiday sounds good but I can’t afford it! Much as I mo...