There will be a few among the many who begin to make collections of various kinds who will keep at it. I know one young man who sold his stamp collection for enough to take him on his first trip abroad. Six hundred dollars was the sum realized, I believe. Those of you who have read Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter's story "The Girl of the Limberlost" remember that "the girl" sold Indian relics and insects enough to send herself to high school and start a college fund. She made up little life history collections to illustrate the talks she gave as special teacher of nature study in the grades in a city school system.
The Limberlost girl had an offer of three hundred dollars for a complete collection of the butterflies and moths of the United States. She had a wonderful collecting ground in and about the big swamp, and she had enough duplicates to exchange with other collectors for things she could not get at home. In order to have perfect specimens, both male and female, she made breeding cages and reared the moths and butterflies. She dug in the earth about the tree roots and other "likely" places for pupæ, she searched the shrubs and vines and trees for hanging cocoons, she brought in innumerable eggs, caterpillars, and chrysalides and the story of her successes and failures fills many delightful pages. It all rings so true that you can't help hoping that you may see her insect collection some day, and hear her tell how she brought this butterfly up "by hand," how she had to wait a year to get a male to complete one series, how narrowly she escaped the quicksands in a wild chase she had for another, and other details of her occupation.
REARING INSECTS
Bandbox breeding-cage for insects
Breeding insects is easy. Look at the home-made breeding-cage illustrated on this page. Materials needed: One round or oval hat box, a strip of wire screen, two and a half feet wide or so and long enough to fit around the inside of the box and lap three inches. Either sew the screen together in the form of a cylinder or fasten it every six inches with paper fasteners. (Any way to keep it together good and tight.) Push the screen down inside the box till it touches the bottom, put the lid on and you are ready for business. If the screen is too wide you will have trouble in reaching to the bottom of the box which you will have to do sometimes, for one reason or another. Into breeding-cages made on this general plan you can put all sorts of material while waiting developments, and get many additions to your collection that you would otherwise miss entirely.
Some surprising facts are often discovered by accident. A breeding-cage containing a female Cecropia, one of our largest and most beautiful moths, was accidentally left near an open window over night. The next morning between twenty and thirty moths of that species were found fluttering about the cage. They had evidently been attracted from some distance, but found their way to their imprisoned sister unerringly.
Collectors have many ways of capturing night flying moths. One way is known as "sugaring." This consists of daubing a sticky, sweet preparation on the trunks of trees and visiting the baits later in the evening with cyanide jars and capturing the specimens which are attracted by the odour to the feast set for them. It is unsportsmanlike and entirely unnecessary to put any poisonous substance in the bait and this practice should be darkly frowned upon.
The best places for sugaring are these: a strip of woodland edging a stream, the rim of the woods adjoining an open field or pasture, old roadways through woods of beech, oak, chestnut, or any mixed growth, wooded slopes in city parks where there is some protecting undergrowth, anywhere about the old groves surrounding country homes. Windy or wet nights are not the best for sugaring, neither are moonlight nights. The ideal night for this is the evening after a hot, sticky day in late summer, the sky overcast and dark but not foggy. You will need a lantern to work by. Keep calm. Quick, nervous movements frighten away more moths than the light.
The following is the unspeakable concoction recommended by one collector as "the best ever" for baiting moths: