The other thing to ponder, this stuff is not good for you. It can cause neurological damage. My bug room is pretty small, so I use it as sparingly as possible. John Yep, it's a cholinesterase inhibitor. My bug room is a roughly 60' X 40' open basement, fairly well ventilated, and I don't spend huge...

In some of my drawers I haven’t change them since I started using these in 2015-16. They are pale yellow but so far no pests, I’m not sure if they still do work or I have no pest in my room. Of course the usable lifetime may vary from drawer to drawer, depending on the rate of air exchange inside t...

I use dichlorvos strips ("No-pest strips") in my lep collection. I cut the large yellow slabs one can purchase into roughly 1/2" squares and pin one in each Cornell drawer. This seems to work well - I've had no infestations since I started using this material years and years ago. But ...

Very good post, Chuck! And I do like the use of "Luminaries"... although somehow I still like the older usage of "Virtuosi" for people like Tennent, Cotton, Sperling, et al.

Cheers,
jh

I get more varmints in my bait traps than in pheromone or light traps. Hornets certainly can devastate a nice catch!

A friend of mine used to sometimes hang a warning label on his traps with words to the effect: "African Killer Bee Research Trap -- Danger -- Keep Away!'

jh

Never had that problem here in the southern Appalachians, but more than once I've left a moth sheet running all night, only to find in the early morning that all the moths were gone from the lower 12-18" of the sheet... and a pile of raccoon poop nearby!
jh

I do truly love collecting skippers, but I've never dreamed about them that I can remember. The only butterfly dream I can vividly recall is one of being on a small island, apparently in the New Georgia group, and watching a male O. victoriae rubianus flying out of reach overhead, just above the edg...

Chuck,

No, don't think I'd go in 2024. Got too many other places to hit, rather than return to one I've seen before. Thanks anyway!
jh

Chuck, Been there, done that. Many years ago a group of 4 or 5 of us spent a long week collecting all over SE AZ during that period. Two drove out in a van with the generator, light traps, batteries, bait, etc; the rest of us flew to Phoenix and rented cars. We stayed in motels some, and rented a ca...

I just went to the central PO in town and mailed my parcel for less than half what the original local PO clerk told me was the cheapest way. I reboxed it in a larger (9X6X6) box, which more than doubled the weight, but it avoided a small-box surcharge and some risk of loss. The clerk I used today ad...

Many thanks, Kevin and Chuck! I'm apparently dealing with a less-than-knowledgable clerk. USPS website says there's a "First Class International Package" class for small light parcels; service to my target country runs about $15-19. And yes, my package is too small to fit the designated li...

Has anyone discovered a way to ship small (say 3X4X3 inches), light (say 2-3 oz) parcels overseas without incurring the absurd cost of using the US Postal Service? A box of this description to a western European country now cost US$ 58 to ship, I was just told by the P.O. clerk. As recently as a yea...

Vernon, Thanks you very much for your very informative reply. I see now why you didn't try hoisting your bait traps to the canopy! I've seen that done with lightweight traps in the tropics, and wondered if anyone had tried it in the US. Did you ever have problems with your large volume of bait getti...

Vernon, Have you ever found that bait traps placed in the canopy attract different species consistently compared to those near ground level?
Tks,
J. Hyatt

Vernon, how much did having lengthy series of specimens contribute to your recognition of potential new species? For me, if I have one specimen that looks a bit different, I'd just write it off as a variant/ form. If I have twenty of something that looks consistently different, it makes me ask why....

I must admit to having a few catch-all drawers myself. They're mostly neotropical Lycaenids or small moths that are awaiting determination... some for several years!

jh

Lovely specimens, and beautiful drawers to look at. But still (I guess it's some German in me), I prefer rigid organization which approaches at least somebody's idea of phylogenetic order. Cheers, jh Me too. Though I do keep some specimens I use regularly for morphological comparison together, with...

Lovely specimens, and beautiful drawers to look at. But still (I guess it's some German in me), I prefer rigid organization which approaches at least somebody's idea of phylogenetic order.

Cheers,
jh

The oral LD50 for permethrin in rats is around 2500mg/KG, and thought to be about 1000mg/kg in human adults. So an average 100 kg adult would need to eat 100 grams (nearly 4 oz) of permethrin to have a 50% chance of dying from its toxicity. The skin adsorption LD50 of permethrin in rabbits is around...

Nice. I’m not sure what qualifies as an aberrant H. eglanterina. Everything that you have pictured except for the male H. chinatiensis is eglanterina. There are collectors with not only entire drawers of eglanterina, but entire cabinets, and they still don’t have every color variant. Generally spea...