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When I investigated I was aghast to discover that the wooden boxes contained a forest of pins, all neatly labeled, and a sea of what appeared to be bumblebee fragments amid thousands of cast skins from larvae of carpet beetles which had eaten the specimens.
The beetles had beaten me to the bees! The labels were mostly from Alaska, in the 1930s. Bumblebees are closely associated with flowers, of course, and indirectly with climate. What great documentation that would have been for comparing environmental conditions of Alaska in the 1930s with those of the present day. Nothing of value remained except the pins.
I commenced my entomological career in the 1950s with a small collection of common insects from my backyard, vacant lots, and any open space within a reasonable hike of the Boston MTA subway and trolley system. I still have both my bugs and my notes, and am in the process of finding them permanent homes in appropriate institutional collections (mostly in Ohio and New England).
Two of the more common insects I encountered were the Yellowbanded Bumblebee and the Nine-spotted Lady Beetle, which was the second-commonest lady beetle in my urban backyard. In the past half century the numbers of Yellowbanded Bumblebees have declined precipitously and as far as I know it is gone from eastern Massachusetts. The 9-spotted Lady Beetle is near the point of extinction globally, not only in New England.
We don’t know the reasons for these declines. Are they part of normal environmental changes? Diseases? Parasites? Are they linked to some factor(s) over which humans have control? Often we have a very incomplete picture of population declines: when and where were was an insect (or anything) last seen? Such documentation is necessary just to get a species listed as threatened or endangered, and for many animals and plants we just do not know.
Thus the importance of conserving dead stuff: old natural history specimens, whether they be bugs on pins, stuffed birds, shells, whatever they are, as long as there is accompanying information on when and where collected. Such collections may be valuable documentation. If you have such a resource, or if you know of someone who has specimens, or administers a small educational collection, or oversees school or camp bug-collecting activities, you can help by seeing that the material is evaluated and properly cared for.
For more information, please email me.