Virginia Cheeseman Blog

What! Where have my customers gone? I know it is the end of the month but I’ve got all these wonderful new animals, I’m rushed off my feet looking after them and have had hardly any orders come in this week L . Perhaps everyone is out enjoying the autumn sunshine? Certainly, the weather here has been lovely this week and I have managed to get out in the garden and do some tidying up before the winter sets in (it must happen eventually). I did hear that there will be months of freezing ice and snow but “la la la, I’m not listening”. The bug room is looking pretty good, I have had to reorganise things since I got Barney, my Bearded Dragon. His huge vivarium takes up an awful lot of space, it had to be positioned on the lower shelf as I have this great idea that I’m going to train him to go up and down his little ladder and help himself to all the bugs running around the floor. My hubby has made the ladder but I’m not sure if this plan is a little too ambitious, what do you think? Does a ...

What a hectic week! Yes, I did it again, were praying mantis on my shopping list? or Pill millipedes? or any of the other ‘daft’ things that I bought last Sunday at the Bedford bug show, I think not! I did get some super new spiders and scorpions but I was supposed to be cutting down on animals before the winter months. I say the praying mantis were a daft buy because the main reason I gave up selling them was that I cannot bear to post them. They are constantly shedding their skins as they grow and it is difficult to know when they are about to moult or have just eaten too much. They are also nervous little animals and more likely to get stressed in transit than most bugs (in my opinion). I have put them on the website as ‘collection only’, perhaps I will put the odd one or two for sale by post after they have moulted but really, I hope people will come and collect them. I am still working hard on Ginny’s Jungle and trying to encourage more people to call on me. Take a look at the ‘Bu...

Calm before the storm, nothing much to report this week on the bug front. However, I will be attending an exhibition on Sunday, so next week it will be ‘all change’. I have my shopping list and will try to stick to it as the winter is fast approaching and sales slow considerably pre-Christmas. I know people find that odd as most businesses have a huge surge of sales at that time but my surge comes in January when my customers have their Christmas money J . I will be concentrating on captive bred animals at the bug show wherever possible and hope to buy mostly arachnids. As I said last week, spiders are selling really well and I’m trying hard to get more scorpions to attempt breeding them. I want to find the more elusive tarantulas that my customers really want, rather than buy lots of cheap ones. I think what I’m trying to say is “quality rather than quantity”. Technology is great when it works but this week I had a couple of hundred emails from the same company over a two-hour period...

Well, I know for a fact that some of you did as I’ve had plenty of messages telling me so and it’s very nice to know that you care J. The blog actually takes some time to write and I like to get it checked over by a family member as I would hate to offend anyone, it is quite an undertaking to write it weekly but I will give it my best shot. I still think it is rather self-indulgent and even I think I moan way too much but it certainly gives an insight into my life with the bugs (plus a bit of everything else in my life too) and people seem to like it. I just have to start with a major moan this week. What is going on? When did it become acceptable to place an order and then casually cancel it or tell me they want it on a certain day or forget it and refund. I am not Amazon and my bugs are live creatures and not something that sits on a shelf to be packed and sent out in a nanosecond. Honestly it is pretty recent but getting worse, people are continually deciding to cancel their order, ...