A few questions about preparing and collecting insects and then photographing them

Nature Talk
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I recently got into contact with a professor at my uni who has been collecting beetles for quite some time, and who has inspired me to start my own collection. Apart from just collecting these organisms, I want to create high resolution images of them as part of a personal “catalogue of life” to help me (as well as anyone else who’s interested) identify things better.
This is the sort of photography I’m hoping to achieve: https://extinctandendangered.com/gallery. More specifically, my goal is to have a dorsal, ventral, and lateral photo for each animal, as well as genitalia or other internal structures if necessary.

My first question is: Is there a way to mount insects without putting a pin through it or gluing it down? Essentially, I want a completely intact specimen for photography, and I’d prefer not to pin it later for the collection as well.
I’ve tried to come up with a few ways, but I don’t think any of them is feasible or even possible on that small scale, at least without specialised skills that I definitely do not have. Perhaps someone here has already done something like this?

Secondly, how do I best mount insect genitalia/other internal structures? These probably don’t have to be removable, so does gluing them to the label work?

Finally, what are your preferred ways of adding scale-bars to photos? I’d like to keep photo edits as minimal as possible. The methods I have used thusfar work, but they either produce results that I don’t find particularly aesthetic or require a decent amount of effort.

Thank you very much in advance for any help! :)

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I can’t answer the questions completely, but at least some of the answers will depend on what type of insects you are aiming to study and preserve. The methods of preservation vary widely depending on what type of insect and how delicate they are.

For some insects, you probably can place them into useful postures using foam and pins (just not pins through them, just to hold in place). Once they dry in that position, you can move them. But storing them and moving them without damaging them will be challenging (and also require a fair amount of space). Pinning making is possible to store and organize a fair amount of insects together and gives an easy way to move the insect without handling it directly. Some insects can be stored wet (eg, in ethanol) but this does affect colors.

For scale bars, since it sounds like you have particular ideas about what end results you like and don’t like, I’d suggest finding some pictures with examples that you do like, and then looking up or asking the photographers about their methods. But basically, you will either need a highly calibrated camera/microscope or to include a known scale object in the photo in the same plane as the specimen to create a scale bar from. If you don’t want the object to appear in the final photo, you can take two photos with the same identical setup, measure the scale in one, and then create a scale bar matching those dimensions in the second. This will require edits, but so will any method that doesn’t rely on just having the actual scale object itself in the photo.

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Wallpaper paste (Tapetenkleister) is what was recommended to me for this purpose – i.e., a starch-based, translucent glue that is water soluble in case you need to examine or reposition the detached insect bits. (This requires only minuscule quantities, so if you or a friend has leftover powder from an apartment renovation, even a gram or two should be enough to supply your needs for quite some time. Leftovers can be kept in the refrigerator, as apparently the mixture is susceptible to yeast contamination and may otherwise ferment. You can also order it pre-mixed from Bioform.)

Regarding unobtrusive pinning methods, I believe sometimes people use tiny headless pins (Minutiennadeln) as a way of mounting insects while avoiding having an obtrusive pin sticking out through the thorax. The pin is then stuck into a narrow strip of foam, which is then attached to a larger pin with the label that secures it in the insect box. I don’t know how feasible this is for larger insects, particularly ones like beetles with thick shells, but for smallish bees it seems to work fairly well as a way of preparing them to serve as “photo models”. Of course it doesn’t completely eliminate the pin, particularly for the view from underneath, but it is much less obvious than a regular insect pin.

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Another strategy that I’ve tried for getting natural-looking documentation photographs when I want to subsequently release my subject unharmed is to chill them or temporarily knock them out with CO2 to render them cooperative. (On the CO2 method, see here.)

Generally this gives you about a minute or two to take photos until they recover enough to try to escape. If you are a better photographer than I, this may be sufficient to capture all the necessary details.

I’m not sure whether I would do this for specimens I intend to kill afterwards, though – I would be uncomfortable subjecting them multiple rounds of stress instead of ensuring that their death, if necessary, is at least as quick and painless as possible.

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For collecting and photographing, basically everything I can find, though I’ll exclude bees and Odonata and some others for now unless I find dead ones, as collecting these requires a special permit in Germany, I believe.
For more thorough study, I’m primarily interested in beetles and flies.

That’s true. I’ll think about it. Maybe I’ll end up pinning them after taking photos after all. I like the unobtrusive pins spiphany mentioned. And I’ll definitely try the other suggestion too:

Do you know how stable it is? It sounds like a perfect solution, but I worry that the gluing surface may be too small for it to work long term. If it doesn’t work, perhaps collagen-based glues (animal hide glue) can work, too? They’re used in painting restauration for being reversible, but I don’t know if/how much heat and/or solvent needs to be applied to deactivate the glue and remove the residue…

Can I pin bigger, tougher subjects “the wrong way” (with the pin-head behind the board)?

Ooh. I’ll do that for bees, seeing as I don’t want to kill them.
Generally, I want to take multiple focus brackets and then stack and merge them. I don’t know if I can manage all that in time. But I should be able to get at least one stack, I think. :)
I agree with not doing this to insects I want to add to the collection.

Wow. This is a very simple and elegant solution. The things I had in mind were way too unnecessarily complicated. Haha

Thank you both! :)

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You can store the more robust insects such beetles in a jar of laurel for many months, or indeed decades if you keep changing the laurel. So I suggest you collect your specimen into laurel and keep it until you are ready to photograph it. As well as preserving it dry, it keeps the limbs relaxed so when you take it out for photography you can arrange it in a life-like position or pretty much any position you want.

I have described the laurel in other forum threads. This is copied from “Getting started with insect collecting”: If you have laurel in your area (Prunus laurcerasus) you can make a killing jar from that. Take a few newish leaves, tear them up and ram them into the bottom of a small jar or large tube, about 1 cm deep. Put a layer of paper tissue on top, again about a centimetre. Needs an airtight lid. The leaves should go brownish in a few hours and when you take the lid off, it should smell of marzipan. That is the cyanide. If it doesn’t, try the same with a different laurel bush. They vary in potency.

When you have one that does give you a marzipan smell, that will kill insects fairly quickly - knocks them out in a few seconds, but leave them in half an hour to make sure. It will preserve them for months, years if you change the laurel occasionally. It also has the benefit of relaxing them so you can re-arrange leg positions, useful for carding beetles and bugs.

A problem that can arise with storage in laurel is the specimen can go greasy, particularly large specimens, and this alters the colour. I have never done so but I understand one way to degrease is to rinse them in petrol, an outdoor job I suggest.

You say you don’t want to pin or glue them. I don’t know of a way to mount them that doesn’t involve pinning or glue, but storing them in 70% Industrial Methylated Spirit, 30% water works well.

You can often extract the genitalia without breaking the connection with the beetle so that makes storage easy - the whole thing goes in the tube of alcohol. If the genitalia do get separated, you can still store them in the same tube, just don’t have more than one beetle per tube.

I used to pin and card 100s of insects per year when I lived in the dry east of England. Since I moved to damp Wales many of those have gone mouldy so I store everything in alcohol now. It is time consuming to extract a reference specimen and dry it out, but that is offset by the time saved in not pinning or carding.

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Thank you, I’ll try the laurel method! The professor has offered to show me how to prepare insects, and he said he has a method for removing grease that works really well. I think using some common cleaning agent…?

In any case, that plant grows everywhere here, so it’s cool to have a cheap and quick way to build a killing chamber. How often do I have to replace the laurel?

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Have a sniff and if it doesn’t smell of marzipan, it needs changing. Or if an insect is still active after 15 mins. I’d often not change it for six months in the tube I use in the field, so the lid was coming off dozens of times.

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Cellulose-based glue is what all the literature I’ve seen recommends, so it seems that generations of entomologists have found it to be effective. I don’t know whether there would be specific disadvantages to using collagen-based glues instead.[1]

Using regular insect pins upside-down would presumably work, but I think you might end up with a situation where the insect pinned this way is too tall to fit into a standard insect box[2] – it works with Minutiennadeln because they are much finer and shorter than the normal insect pins. I suppose you could snip off the head and top cm or so of the pin once the insect has been arranged to your satisfaction. This sort of arrangement is not as easy to work with than a simple pin through the thorax if you later need to examine specimens.

There’s a good beginner’s guide to insect preparation here:
https://www.bioform.de/Bilder/Präparation_Wirbellose_JSchmidl_2019.pdf

These two guides are specifically for bees, which present some challenges that aren’t as much of an issue with bugs and beetles, but there are some useful illustrations of different mounting techniques:

Andreas Werner Ebmer (2010): Sammeln, Präparieren und Mikroskoptechnik von Wildbienen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Furchenbienen (Apoidea, Halictidae). Entomologica Austriaca 17: 67-82. https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/ENTAU_0017_0067-0082.pdf

Sebastian Hopfenmüller, Antonia V. Mayr (2023): Präparation mitteleuropäischer Wildbienen. Linzer biologische Beiträge 55(1): 387-402 https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/LBB_0055_1_0387-0402.pdf

There is some question about how the German law[3] for insects that fall under special protection is to be interpreted. My understanding is that technically a permit is required not just for collecting specimens, but also for disturbing or capturing them, even if they are subsequently released. I am also told that strict adherence to this letter of the law would be utterly impractical for the everyday work of bee researchers. So you will have to decide where within this grey zone you are comfortable situating your own activities. Westrich has some reflections on this topic: https://www.wildbienen.info/system/sammeln.php

Other relevant reading:

Gábor L. Lövei, Marco Ferrante (2024): The Use and Prospects of Nonlethal Methods in Entomology. Annual Review of Entomology 69: 183-198. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ento-120220-024402

  1. I took a class on bee preparation last fall and did find that it does take a bit of practice to get the right consistency and dosage of the glue, as well as some care that the genitalia don’t get lost while the glue is still drying, but I can’t offer extensive long-term Erfahrungswerte. ↩︎

  2. I’ve been using Bioform’s “Systembox/Transportbox mittel mit dicht schließendem Flachdeckel und Plastozoteauslage” as an inexpensive alternative to a proper insect box and there isn’t a lot of height to spare between the top of the pins and the lid. ↩︎

  3. §44 (1) BNatSchG: “Es ist verboten, wild lebenden Tieren der besonders geschützten Arten nachzustellen, sie zu fangen, zu verletzen oder zu töten oder ihre Entwicklungsformen aus der Natur zu entnehmen, zu beschädigen oder zu zerstören” ↩︎

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