Soon to be Spring!
Soon to be Spring! Well it is only a month and the sun is shining this morning (I know it is freezing cold – I had to take Teddi out for a walk earlier). I keep coming into the house and going straight into my bug room to warm up. It is so nice and ‘hot’ in there.
I couldn’t write a blog last week as we were at a funeral down in Kent. The bad news just keeps on coming at the moment in my family. Clearly I cannot go into details here but I appreciate everyone’s continued support. I had three lots of visitors to my bug room last Sunday afternoon and it was really pleasant. I enjoyed a good chat with like minded people and showed off my little creatures. When I lived in west London I had quite a few visitors but nowadays it is a rare event and three in one day was like going back in time to my vibrant Saturday afternoon ‘open days’. I did try to organise open afternoons in our current location but spent the afternoon twiddling my thumbs.
Half term almost over (isn’t the traffic reduced when the kids aren’t at school), I expect this coming week will be busy. I managed to get a few more Giant Train millipedes a couple of days ago. They are so popular that I’m sure they will go quickly, the last ones were sold in a week. I have lots of millipedes now and most are breeding well but I just cannot get the Giant Train millipedes to breed, any tips would be much appreciated!
My web guy had a busy week and was unable to fit in upgrading my tarantula section on the site. I really hope he has time next week as I cannot easily add special offers to the section as it is now but once the upgrade goes ahead I would like to reduce the prices and clear some stock. I am overrun with tarantulas since the recent South of England Tarantula show (what a great show it was).
I am very pleased with the way that scorpion sales have been going lately. I really like scorpions and I have put a lot of effort into them over the last year or so, with the result that I now have many species as captive bred juveniles and they are coming along nicely. Scorpions are slow growing but they live for years and are fascinating to watch. There is still so much to learn about them. I have no intention of keeping the more venomous species but I know people who do and there are some very beautiful but deadly scorpions around the world. Let’s face it I couldn’t keep anything that was truly venomous as after all these years I seem to have lost my fear of them and am just not careful enough. I am forever being bitten and scratched by my little friends. I’m sure this will make you laugh but daft as it sounds, it is true. I occasionally leave little notes on my desk when something new has bitten or stung me. My “just in case” notes. I wrote one such note earlier this week. I was feeding and checking my Giant Australian Rhinoceros cockroaches when one of the sharp spines on it’s leg penetrated my little finger. It really hurt and I was just a bit worried that it may in fact be venomous. My hand started to ache so I wrote a little report of what and where the injury had occurred. Needless to say I forgot all about it later and the note got buried under paperwork, when I mentioned it to my husband he said he would never have found it but I think he would if he came home and found me collapsed with anaphylactic shock! So, does anyone know if it is possible for these cockroaches to carry venom? They feed on Eucalyptus and I think I have heard that it can be poisonous? After all it wasn’t that long ago that it was discovered that Komodo Dragons have poisonous saliva!
I am continuing in my quest to write a little information about keeping various bugs that are on my website and adding info on individual tarantula species. This week I realised that there was no description shown for the Thailand Black tarantula. I have now rectified that, they were after all the first species of tarantula that I ever bred (back in the olden days). They are not a species that I would recommend for beginners but I assume I just stumbled across a male/female pair and decided to give it a go. I still remember my dismay when the female grabbed the male and dragged him down her burrow before I could do anything and then spat out bits of him later (there were tears).