Making of Beetle Specimens - Part 2 (06 Jun 2020)

This is the long overdue Part 2 of the Making of Beetle Specimens post. Here are some of the beetle specimens that I managed to pin during the Covid-19 circuit breaker period. Enjoy!

Making Of Beetle Specimens (24 Apr 2020)

Singapore's circuit breaker measure was extended to 1 June 2020 and so I will not be able to do my regular macro photography until after that. So during this period of stay-home, I decided to take the opportunity to mount some of the dead beetle specimens I have collected over the years that I didn't get down to mounting them.

A disclaimer upfront - this post is not intended to illustrate proper entomology standard of mounting insect specimens but to share how I process my beetle specimens for personal collection. An obvious difference would be the pin through the specimens. For me, I don't like my specimens to be "pinned-through" as required by entomology mounting. For those who are interested in the proper way of mounting insects, here's a link to a website that I came across on properly mounting insects - A Guide To Mounting Insects On Pins.

The key to preserving beetle specimens is in the drying of the beetle specimens. As Singapore enjoys sunny days most part of the year, I would simply put the beetle specimens out in the sun to dry over a few days. To prevent flies, ants and birds (yes, birds too!) from feasting on your beetle specimens while they are drying out, I would usually spray insects repellent on them. If you do not like the smell of insects repellent, you can opt for those odourless insect repellent. After drying, you can put them into an air-tight container with some moth balls put inside. This should keep insects from feasting on your collection and you can keep store them for years.

Before we can start mounting your dried beetle specimens, the first thing to do is to "relax the beetle" (i.e. to loosen the "frozen" joints of the beetle specimen). To do so, you will need a container with a piece of moist tissue paper. Please ensure that the tissue is not dripping wet.

Select the dried specimen that you want to mount. I have chosen this dried Stag Beetle (Odontolabis femoralis) for the illustration here. This is the type of beetle that first arouse my interests in beetles in 2002, during a holiday trip to West Malaysia's Cameron Highlands.

Depending on the size of the beetle, you will need to leave the beetle in the relaxing container for 1 hour to several hours. If you do not want to wait, you can put the specimen on a steamer dish and pour hot water into the container and "steam" the specimen for about 15 min.

To mount insect specimens, you will minimally need pins and a mounting board.

The pins that I use are the normal pins used for sewing as they are easily available from neighbourhood stores. There are no difference in terms of the size of the pin-head, use the type of pins that you are comfortable with. For me, I prefer to use pins with the normal pin head for aesthetic reason.

The mounting board I use are discarded packing styrofoam pieces, either soft or hard styrofoam will do. For me, I will use any styrofoam that I can find.

To start mounting, place the relaxed beetle specimen on the styrofoam.

The first thing to do is to stabilise the beetle specimen on the mounting board by pinning the thorax, front and back of the specimen. This can be easily done by pin-through the specimen which I mentioned earlier on.

Once the main body of the specimen is secured, I would usually position and pin the front legs first. What we want to achieve here is to achieve identical positioning of the legs, both from the top and from the side. Use as many pins as you like, there is no right or wrong when it comes to positioning the legs, it is more of personal and aesthetic preference.

For the legs, I would usually have the pin at an acute angle.

After pinning the legs, the last thing to do is to position the antennae. To get at the antennae, you will need to use a pincer to carefully take out the antennae from the underside of the head. You need to be gentle with the antennae and will require a bit of patience in positioning the antennae.

Once the antennae are positioned, you are basically done. All you need to do is to wait 2-3 days for the specimen to dry up and you can unpin them for storing. You can store them in air-tight containers with moth balls for years.

I will share some of the beetles that I have mounted recently in the next post.

Night Walk At A Secret Place (07 Nov 2015)

A fellow beetle-lover informed me that he know of a location in Singapore where the Aegus chelifer Stag Beetle can be found. I managed to get some direction to the place and decided to check out the place together with Reynard (another fellow beetle-lover).

In all honesty, I was not very hopeful to find the Aegus chelifer Stag Beetle but nevertheless I was looking forward to the trip. Here's a photograph of a Four-lined Tree Frog (Polypedates leucomystax) that we encountered at the secret location.

The first beetle encountered at the place was a commonly Chafer Beetle (Apogonia expeditionis). This particular type of beetle was out in large number, and you can find them almost on every plant that we checked.

Near to the Apogonia expeditionis Chafer Beetle was a lone Leaf Beetle (Graphops curtipennis).

Moving to a patch of tall Simpoh Air plants, a lone Leaf Beetle (Aulacophora frontalis) was on a dried up vine on the plant.

There were not many beetles encountered along the way and hence this tiny 2 mm beetle was a welcomed sight.

More walking without finding any beetles and I was glad to find this commonly encountered Chafer Beetle (Adoretus compressus) resting under a leaf.

Next to the Adoretus compressus Chafer Beetle was a first-time-encountered Chafer Beetle. This looked very much like the Apogonia aequabilis Chafer Beetle but it has a much broader body.

Coming to some large plants, I was glad to find another first-time-encountered Long Horned Beetle.

Near to the Long Horned Beetle was a pair of mating Click Beetle (Pectocera babai). This is the first time I encountered the female of the species. Didn't expect it to be so much bigger than the male.

We finally reached the spot that we were told where the Aegus chelifer Stag Beetles can be found. Instead of finding the Stag Beetle, I found this 5 mm Darkling Beetle instead.

After some searching, our efforts were finally rewarded with the finding of a female Aegus chelifer Stag Beetle.

We got really excited when we found a small Aegus chelifer Stag Beetle larvae.

To our amazement, we managed to find a total of 2 female, 4 male and 2 larvae of the Aegus chelifer Stag Beetle. It is likely that there are more of them around the area.  After photographing the beetles, they were returned to their original hiding places. And we make a promise to keep this location a secret in order to protect this rare beetle from being poached.

Here are the rest of the Aegus chelifer Stag Beetles that we found at the location.

While looking for the Aegus chelifer Stag Beetle, Reynard found this unique looking beetle larvae.

After all the excitements, we decided to call it a day and leave via another path. Along the way, we found a few of this shiny Chafer Beetle on a small bush.

Before we reached the end of the trail, we found a patch of badly eaten vegetation, with a few tens of the culprit Chafer Beetle (Phyllophaga marginalis) on them.

The last beetle for the trip was a mating pair of Leaf Beetle found with the Phyllophaga marginalis Chafer Beetle.

I was so focused in wanting to find the Aegus chelifer Stag Beetle that I totally forgotten that I am also testing out a new DIY diffuser. The diffuser works pretty well, just that it still let too much light through, creating hot spots on the beetles photographed. This was a wonderful trip with the finding of the Aegus chelifer Stag Beetle.

If you happened to know of locations where you can find other species of  Stag Beetle in Singapore, appreciate that you can share that with me at davidmoh1313@gmail.com . Thank you.