What a busy week
What a busy week. I have been sending out orders each day and receiving new stock on an almost daily basis. I have ordered new shelving units for my bug house because the current shelving is attached to the walls and I am terrified that the weight is going to cause the building to collapse soon. The new shelves are free standing and industrial strength. Unfortunately there was a mistake with the order and not all the shelving units have been sent out. The mistake turned out to be a problem with the website that we bought from but I didn't find that out until after I had torn a strip off my husband for ordering the wrong thing (oops, I have made several grovelling apologies since).
Everything is going very well in the bug house, I have been mating mantids and spiders since my return last week and I have several spiders with egg sacs from previous matings. I am not sure why but my Chile Beauty tarantula decided to abandon her egg sac, I left it for a couple of days but then I thought that I needed to intervene. I expected the eggs to be damaged in some way but they looked fine. They are at the 'eggs with legs' stage and I am expecting them to moult into spiderlings soon. I got some magnificent Tail-less Whip scorpions in this week and I am hoping that these will breed. I have Land Hermit crabs in stock again and I am expecting to have some of the new red Land Hermit crabs soon. I have received many spider species this week and it was amazing that they were being purchased as soon as I entered them onto my website. The new site is still fascinating me, I'm learning things all the time but there are lots of things that I need to do. When I can find some time I really need to add more information to individual species. One thing that is proving a problem is customers wanting to add to an existing order. Many people are going through the order process and ending up paying another lot of postage. I have been refunding people up until now but it is a real pain and takes time so I've decided no more. I will be putting a note on the site ASAP to tell people to contact me in advance as there are ways around this. Some people have worked out that they just need to put 'collection' and then I can add it to their original order but of course this only works if I haven't already posted out the order!
Thankfully the postal service seems fine now, I haven't had any reports of delayed items. I have been using heat packs in some parcels but the weather isn't too bad yet. I am sending far more parcels to Europe these last few weeks and that seems to be going well too. Airsure is a very good service, most items arrive in just two days.
Well I'm off to clear up the bug house now. Hopefully I will have some visitors to my open afternoon tomorrow but as yet only one person has said they 'might' come along.