Junior Naturalist Summer Camp

Junior Naturalist Summer Camp with Thanksgiving Point Institute

This was our first year for our new Junior Naturalist Camp! This camp was done jointly with Thanksgiving Point, so a big shout out to our friends at Thanksgiving Point! We couldn’t have done it without you.

This week was jam-packed with fun activities helping kids learn how to be a naturalist. They learned important biological principles all the while having a lot of fun! The camp was at the Bean Museum on Monday and Wednesday, and Thanksgiving point hosted on Tuesday and Thursday. We’re going to share a few things that happened here at the Bean Museum.

On Monday we learned about the role of observation in science. The kids learned about how to observe things and then we went out to go observe plants and animals outdoors. We used these super awesome beautiful notebooks to record our observations. They’re on sale at the Museum store if anyone wants one for themselves!

Later that day we learned about collecting plants and insects, and went out to go find some cool things in the great outdoors.

On Wednesday we had a great time exploring the research collections here at the Bean Museum, and learning about all the cool research that goes on there.

Later that day we learned how to display and mount the insects that were caught on Monday and to mount the plants that were collected. We had some very proud owners of new insect collections, complete with labels!

On Friday the kids were able to display and explain about all they learned this week at both Thanksgiving Point and the Bean Museum. They showed off their awesome insect collections, as well as their mounted plant specimens!

It was a great week! Thanks to everybody who participated in the awesome Junior Naturalist Camp! Even lunch breaks were fun! Hope to see lots of people there next year.

Jessica, museum educator

Behind the Scenes - The Insect Collection

We have a secret. What you see when you come here to the Bean Life Science Museum is only a fraction of what we actually have stored here. On display we have a few hundred animals for you to see. Behind the scenes, we over a million plants and animals! Want to see what is behind those closed doors?

The insect collection houses over 2 million insects! That’s a lot of creepy crawlies. The insect collection is just one of eight scientific collections here at the Bean Life Science Museum.

Why do we have so many insects? When Dr. Shawn Clark (the entomology collection manager) is asked this question, he reminds people that when you are talking about insects, you are dealing with a lot species. In fact, when you count all named species across all living things, there about the same number of insect species as everything else combined! We need a lot of insects just to get an accurate representation of what is out there.

This insect collection is used primarily for research.  Most of that research is on systematics which is the study of understanding how living things are related to each other.

How do we keep these specimens safe? Insects are collected and stored a variety of ways. Typically an insect is collected with nets or different kinds of traps.

Most insects are stored on pins. This works really well for insects since they have an external skeleton. The external skeleton won’t shrivel up when it’s dried. This means that a dried insect specimen on a pin looks just like the insect did when it was alive! It is, however, extremely fragile so they are never touched directly. If they are not stored on pins, insects can also be preserved in ethanol, envelopes, or microscope slides.

You can start your own insect collection easily at home. It’s fun and interesting to see the variety of insects all around us! Visit our museum store for supplies.