Your first box full will be a varied assortment. When you have all you can conveniently pin into three boxes without crowding, you will want to arrange them. If you have begun to study science you will know what "classify" means. Every school is made up of classes. So with insects. You will know by the looks of the insects that certain ones belong together. A good way to start is to put all the butterflies and moths into one box. You may not know what you have done, but you have simply separated the members of the order Lepidoptera from all the others. Look over those that are left and you will see that some, like the blundering June bug, have their wings so placed that a straight line appears down the middle of the back. These belong together, regardless of their colour, size, shape, habits, or other considerations. They belong to the order Coleoptera. Grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets belong to another group and can be pinned together. All the flies have two wings, and belong in a group apart from all the four-winged ones. The dragon flies go together. You will have representatives of other orders, less easy to distinguish, but by the time your collection has grown to this extent you will be ready for some beginner's book on entomology, which will make further classification simple enough. As you shift your specimens from one box to another observe a certain regularity of arrangement. The heads should all point in one direction. When pinning a group all of which are about one size, set the pins all in line, in military fashion. How much better they look! This neat, formal arrangement of the specimens adds greatly to your satisfaction and enjoyment of your collection. Avoid crowding and breakage. A dried specimen is almost everlasting, but at the same time it is the most fragile thing you can imagine.
As your collection grows in size, value, and interest, you will certainly want wooden cases. Perhaps your manual training teacher will be willing to let you build a box under his direction. A cabinet-maker can make them at one dollar or less, apiece, of well-seasoned basswood.
Before you have been collecting long, you will have learned by observation quite a lot about insects and their ways. You will know that some localities are very poor collecting ground, that other places yield an abundant variety; that the best time for butterflies is in a sunny forenoon; while moths are abroad in the early twilight and later. You will see that dragon flies are fond of flying about over streams or ponds and you may wonder why as you try in vain to net a fine one without getting your feet wet. Other insects are frankly aquatic and you can get them only by dipping your net in. It is well to have a second net if you expect to do much water collecting as the cloth is hard to smooth out after a wetting. As a majority of insects are vegetarian you will naturally seek among plants for specimens. If the winged forms are not eating the foliage you may discover that they are laying eggs on the leaves of the food plant on which their young must develop. If you live in town you will find it worth while to carry your bottle with you when you go out in the evening. Nocturnal insects of all kinds are attracted to electric lights, many of them to their death, as you will see. A candle in your open window will attract some valuable additions to your collection and also some you will sleep better without. Some collectors care nothing for a specimen unless it is rare. A better way is to regard them all as rare until you secure a specimen for your box, and of equal value towards building up a complete collection.
A LIFE HISTORY COLLECTION
You can not collect insects very long before you begin to see a lot of things you never noticed before. You see leaves cut or eaten in strange forms, or you find a cluster of tiny eggs on a leaf, or several leaves sewed or stuck together with strands of silk. Perhaps you find strange abnormal growths on certain plants, swellings on their stems, leaves transformed into balls, or pod-like or cone-like affairs which do not look natural. These things are sure to arouse your curiosity. Sometimes the answer to your question is right there. Cut open a swollen golden-rod stalk and you will find the culprit which caused the plant to grow that way. But how did the footless, helpless grub get there and when? You break down the mud-dauber wasp's nest from among the rafters of some building. What is that yellowish object that rolls from among the ruined adobe walls? Look! It is a spider. What business has a spider in the wasp's nest, if it is her nest? Spiders have none too good a reputation, but this spider does not act very spry. Seems to be alive, yet not alive.
The secret of the relation between the spiders and the wasps you can read in many a book. You might even guess at it, but there was no guess work about the observer who first studied out this secret. He did not get his knowledge from books. He patiently watched the mud-dauber going about her house building. He knew that her painstaking labour could have but one meaning. She was building not a home for herself, but for her children.
The wasp's children are not little wasps, yet they are none the less young wasps for being footless, colourless, wingless, stingless grubs. They are eggs at first of course, just as all insects are. When the mother wasp has one cell of her apartment house finished she concerns herself immediately with stocking the larder. Knowing the tastes of her yet unborn young, she leaves for a time the mud hole, and visits the haunts of certain spiders. Finding one to her liking, she captures it. Not appreciating the fact that the law forbids the use of preservatives in meats, she injects a drop of some wonder-working fluid into the spider and preserves the creature, not only fresh but alive, though paralyzed. Upon the inert body she places an egg, then seals the cell, well assured in her mind that when the grub hatches it will find the food just as she left it and just enough to nourish the young one to maturity.
Before your first season of collecting is past you will find yourself bringing home as specimens many insects which you will see are not fully grown. Little grasshoppers, scarcely bigger than a fly yet possessed of such strength of leg that they can hurl themselves into the air for a distance equal to twenty times their own length. How do you know that they are young grasshoppers and not fully grown ones of some tiny race? Look at one closely and you will see a look of youth about him that is unmistakable. He is fuzzy, his head is too big for him, his legs out of all proportion to the rest of him. Then, too, he has no wings, just little buds where the wings will be some day. By these tokens you will know him for a baby. You can find them in all sizes and can have a series to show the stages of growth. This is one of the first steps in the making of a "Life History Collection," far more valuable to the naturalist than a collection containing only mature insects.
Generally speaking, all adult insects have wings, and all winged insects are adults. There are exceptions to this, but they will take their places when the time comes. The young of the insects belonging to certain orders resemble their parents enough so as to be placed where they belong at a glance. This is true of the grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets, of the true bugs which include the squash-bugs, the chinch-bug, the stink-bug and others. Of most of the other orders this is not true. The young do not look at all like the adults. In many cases as, for example, the dragon fly and the mosquito, they are fitted in the immature stages to a life in the water. They must, on this account, have organs for swimming, for aquatic breathing, and for getting a living in the water. The forms of these young insects are just as varied as those of the adults, but they do not resemble the winged ones in the least. The life history collection must contain specimens of the immature forms of insect life as well as adults if it is to be most useful and complete.
Some orders of insects, as for example the moths, butterflies, beetles, flies, bees, wasps, ants, and others pass through four distinct changes of form. They always follow the same order. Every generation, beginning with the egg, passes next to the larva (called caterpillar or incorrectly worm, or grub, or maggot), on to the pupa, then to the adult. The egg of an insect is often a most beautiful object. With a hand lens, which every collector will surely need, one can see its delicate colouring, its pearl-like shell, its curiously carved or sculptured surface. To get some idea of the great variety in form, colour, shape, and markings of insects' eggs, ask at your library for a book on butterflies, with coloured plates, and the chances are that you will be surprised.