The long version

The collection is kept to the Indiana 4-H entomology project, run through Purdue Extension. The box grows every year, and each grade asks for more specimens and more identification. Everything must be personally collected, in the United States — a bought specimen or a gift stays in the catalog forever, but it never counts toward an exhibit.

Less than people expect. A net, pins, a killing jar and a box will get you a real collection; the rest makes it easier or lets you catch things you otherwise couldn't. Marked below is what is already on the bench and what still has to be found — the two that matter are the ethyl acetate, which is a drugstore errand, and the 24 × 18 display box, which is the only thing here that has to be right for the fair.

The paper. The day sheet and the bag slips are one two-page PDF, black and white, made to be printed at home in a stack. Download it here.

This is the part people go quiet about, so: a collection is made of animals that were killed on purpose. It is worth doing quickly and properly, and it is worth only taking what you will actually keep. Catch, look, and let go what you already have.

The freezer does three different jobs. It is worth knowing which one you are using it for. Killing — no jar to hand, so the bag goes in the freezer and a day or two does it. Storing — already dead, but there is no time to pin tonight, so it waits. And quarantine — anything coming into the house from outside, or from another collector, goes in for 48 hours first to kill dermestid eggs before it can get near the collection. Museums do this with every incoming shipment, and it is how you avoid losing a box to beetles three years from now.

Nothing is required to go in the freezer. If a specimen can be pinned the same day it was caught, pin it — nothing is ever easier to work with than something that never dried out. The freezer is a pause button, not a step.

The freezer method, when you use it. A catch goes into a labelled zip bag and straight into the freezer, where a day or two kills it without a chemical in the house. It is legitimate, it is what a lot of collectors do, and it has one real advantage: a frozen specimen keeps until there is time to pin it. Take it out, let it come to room temperature in the bag so condensation forms on the plastic and not on the insect, and pin it while it is still soft.

The jar method is faster and better for delicate things. The jar is a wide-mouth jar with an absorbent layer in the bottom — plaster, or a stack of blotting paper — charged with ethyl acetate. It works in minutes and leaves the specimen soft enough to pin, which is exactly what you want. Put a few strips of crumpled tissue in with it so things have somewhere to sit instead of grinding against each other.

Two jars, kept separate. A beetle loose in a jar with a moth will strip the scales off its wings and ruin it. Butterflies and moths in particular should be pinched firmly on the sides of the thorax through the net the moment they are caught — it stops the thrashing that wrecks the wings before the jar has done anything.

The jar is not a storage container. Leave a specimen in it for days and it goes greasy and discoloured. Get things out and pinned the same day if you possibly can.

Pin while the specimen is fresh and soft. If it has dried out, it will shatter rather than take a pin — that is what the relaxing chamber is for: a sealed box with a damp layer in the bottom, a day or two, and the specimen is workable again.

Use real insect pins, size 2 or 3. A sewing pin is too thick, too short to leave room for labels, and corrodes into the specimen and destroys it from the inside. This is not fussiness; it is the difference between a specimen that lasts ten years and one that doesn't.

The pin goes vertically through the body, in a place that misses the features somebody will later need to look at to identify it — which is why it is a different place for different orders:

Every pin to the same height. That is what the pinning block is for. A box where every specimen sits at one height with its labels at one height reads as a collection; a box where they wander reads as a school project, and a judge notices in about two seconds.

Butterflies and moths go on a spreading board with the front wings pulled forward until their rear edges make a straight line across the body, held down with strips of paper, and left alone for a week. Impatience here is how wings end up dropped.

Every specimen carries more than one number, and they are not interchangeable. Museums keep them separate for good reasons, and the words below are the ones an actual curator uses — they come from Darwin Core, the standard every museum publishes its collection data to.

Why keep a field number at all, then? For the days the phone stays in the pocket. In the field there is sometimes no signal and no time — there is a pencil and a bag. Keeping both means a bag in a freezer and a record in a database can always be matched, months apart, without anybody remembering anything. When the specimen was started on the phone, the catalog number IS the bag number, and there is nothing to reconcile.

The catalog number can be corrected. A mistyped bag, two specimens entered out of order — change it on the specimen's page, and change the bag or label to match. The one rule the database holds is that two specimens in a volume cannot share a number. Everything else is a choice, and choices are editable.

Numbers are never reused. If a specimen is destroyed, its number retires with it. The guidance from the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections is explicit about this, and it is the single rule that makes a catalog worth anything in fifty years.

Two labels under every specimen, both on the same pin, both squared up with the body so they read from the same side.

The locality label goes on first and never changes. It says where, when, and who — and it is the part that makes the specimen worth keeping. The determination labelgoes below it and says what it is. That one is meant to be replaceable: identifications get corrected, and correcting one should never mean disturbing the record of where the animal came from.

Dates use Roman numerals for the month — 25.X.2026 — which is the standard on specimen labels worldwide, so that nobody in another country ever has to wonder whether 8/9 means August or September. There is no slashed date anywhere in this project.

Labels here are written by hand, on the kit's pre-cut 18 × 8 mm archival card with the archival pen: open the specimen, Label tab, and copy the two cards it shows line for line in block capitals, scientific name underlined. Locality label at the middle step of the pinning block, determination label at the lowest. Press It's on the pin. That is how most collections are labelled and it lasts a century.

The site can also print a whole sheet at true size — every queued specimen's two labels — for a laser printer on cotton rag card. Same words either way. That is for when there is label stock and a laser printer; the pen is for now.

A pinned specimen is dry and brittle and lasts indefinitely if two things are kept away from it: pests and light. Dermestid beetles will eat a collection from the inside and you will not notice until it is dust — which is why the box seals, and why it gets opened and looked at every few months rather than admired once and forgotten. Direct sunlight bleaches the colour out of everything.

Write Case 1, Case 2 on the lids. Inside, arrange by order and keep like with like — all the beetles together, all the flies together, a small header label pinned above each group, room left to grow. It looks better, it is how a judge reads it, and it is how you notice you have eleven beetles and no grasshoppers. The catalog number on each label is how any one of them is found again; the printed catalog list in the binder says which case.

Half this equipment is a shaped block of wood sold for forty dollars, which makes it a good candidate for a 3D printer. These are real, and we checked them.

Two of these are already covered. The student kit came with a wooden pinning block and a plastazote spreading board, and the plastazote is the better object — it takes a pin and holds it, which printed PLA does not. Print these only for a second set, or for the ones nobody sells.

MakerWorld is thin for this. Searching it for entomology returns articulated beetles and fridge magnets — it is a toy library more than a tool library. The serious equipment is on Printables and Thingiverse. Worth knowing before spending an evening looking.

Worth designing, since nobody has: a field vial caddy that holds eight vials upright so they cannot roll and knock; a set of unit trays, the small open boxes that sit inside a display drawer holding one species each, which every real collection is built from and which cost a fortune to buy; and a cutting jig for trimming labels straight, which is otherwise fiddly and annoying at that size.

The method above is the ordinary entomological one, written out in our own words. The authority Jed is actually judged against is Purdue Extension's How To Make An Awesome Insect Collection (ID-401), which goes further than this page does and has the pictures. The Indiana 4-H entomology project page carries the manuals and score sheets. Requirements are administered by the county — Lake County's handbook is the last word on what the box has to contain.

If anything here disagrees with those, they are right and this page is wrong. Tell us and we'll fix it.