Two New Arrivals

Easter has been and gone, the weather here has been pretty rotten. I went out on Good Friday and it rained, we had a barbeque on Easter Sunday and it was cold and wet (plus the gas ran out and I had to cook the food in the oven and under the grill!). However the bugs are doing well and I was very excited to discover two little baby Crested geckos when I cleaned out my gecko tank. The eggs had hatched in the moss box within the cage. They are gorgeous, I have never bred any lizards before. I was also pleased to find newts in my sister's garden this week. I was organising a bug hunt for my sister's grandchildren and was amazed to turn over a rock and instead of the usual, slugs, worms and woodlice there were two newts. I am in the process of putting in a new wildlife pond in front of my bug house and I would love to put some newts in it (whether they would stay there is another matter).

I spent some time over Easter re-arranging my spider shelves. I have several 'unidentified' tarantulas, all of them are getting to a reasonable size now. These are spiders that I have bought in as spiderlings but for one reason or another I have not quite trusted their identification. I think I will get my husband to put their photos on the site and then I will see what other people think they are. My beautiful Wandering spider has been carrying around a large egg sac for several weeks and it hatched into a cloud of spiderlings last week. I have now removed 'mum' from the tank and put in plenty of fruit flies and micro crickets. The spiderlings are all very active and look nice and healthy. I am waiting for my South American Fishing spiders to lay egg sacs, they are getting fatter and fatter and I know that they mated (I watched them). I did have one egg sac a few weeks ago but sadly it got a bit too damp and perished. I was feeding the scorpions today and discovered that one of the Giant Black Forest scorpions has babies on her back. I'm not sure how many as she was hiding in her coconut shell and I didn't want to disturb her. Talking of coconut shells, I was looking around a reptile centre recently and noticed they sold half a coconut shell for £3.99! They were being marketed as spider caves but they were literally half a coconut. Yes, they were perfectly sawn in half and looked a lot neater than my shells but I got to eat the coconut and they only cost about 50p in the supermarket. I pointed this out to the shop assistant and was told they sell loads of them. Some people have more money than sense (as my mum would say).

Yesterday was an eventful day, I was just in the middle of catching up on emails when we had a power cut. I expected it to come back on after a few minutes, as it generally does. However this power cut lasted for over two hours. It makes you realise just how much we rely on electricity these days. I had somebody calling to collect an order and it was very difficult to sort out tiny mantids in the half light in my bug house. I couldn't use my computer, cordless phones, make a cup of tea - no kettle, vacuum my office, in fact everything that I had planned to do needed power. I ended up sorting out the greenhouse and doing some gardening. My garden is looking great at the moment, I must take some photos, it's a real wildlife haven. Flowers are popping up everywhere, it wouldn't be everyone's idea of a perfect garden but I'm really not into formal gardens. Our garden is sort of country garden gone wild.

I recently mentioned in my blog that I was finding it difficult to get boxes for posting out orders. My local Tesco don't seem to put their wine boxes out anymore but I have found that the garden centre near me seems to have plenty of small boxes by the tills so I'm popping down there regularly now.