The Wonderful Ways of Insects and Spiders [ 249 



When your box is ready the bottom should be lined with cork, 

 into which you can stick your mounting pins. Two sheets of 

 corrugated cardboard, one placed on top of the other with the 

 corrugations of one running at right angles to those of the other, 

 may be substituted for cork. A few flakes of the chemical dichlor- 

 benzol sprinkled under the cork will prevent tiny beetles from 

 turning the specimens into a fine brown dust. 



You can then pin butterflies and moths in rows and columns. 

 The ambitious collector can add a further refinement by organ- 

 izing the specimens, putting insects of the same family in the 

 same box and placing a male and female of a species side by side. 



Many museums gladly furnish more detailed instructions to 

 amateurs, and research in most libraries will yield excellent infor- 

 mation about arranging and mounting specimens. The Naturalists' 

 Directory published by the Cassino Press of Salem, Mass., in- 

 cludes the names of places where equipment needed for insect 

 collecting and preserving may be purchased. 



BEETLES 23,000 SPECIES IN NORTH AMERICA 



Beetles Get Around: Probably the easiest of all insects to collect 

 or to become acquainted with in the flesh are the beetles. Not only 

 can they be found in innumerable places out-of-doors they ap- 

 pear, unbidden and unwelcome, in city apartments. 



Carpet beetles sometimes appear as if by magic in the wool of 

 rugs and upholstery and in stored cheese and cereals. Equally tiny 

 beetles turn up in dried fruits and cereal products. We have 

 already seen that if your family has been collecting butterflies 

 and you begin to notice fine brown dust falling from your speci- 

 mens, you can be sure that beetles are working on them. 



Differences and Resemblances Among Beetles: Once you start 

 looking at beetles with some care, you will appreciate the amaz- 

 ing degree of variation among them; the result is an enormous 

 number of species. Beetles vary in size from minute specimens 

 to some, found in the tropics, that are larger than a mouse. There 

 are at least twenty- three thousand species on the North American 

 continent alone. Varied as the members of this insect tribe are in 



