This facility contains two collections of the Division of
Invertebrate Zoology.
Both part of the hymenoptera, the ants, bees and wasps.
One collection, housed in these half-height cabinets down this corridor,
is the wasp nest collection, which is the worlds largest.
The other collection, housed in these cabinets,
is the gall wasp collection of Alfred Kinsey, who studied gall wasps well
before he started studying human sexuality. Social wasps are very familiar
to people
and have been
since time immemorial.
Possibly humans got the idea for making paper from watching wasps chew wood
and mixing it with saliva. This is a complicated beautiful structure,
and it's made by a group of insects that have a brain about the size
of a pin head.
Now, to make something that complex, all of these insects have to have a complex
society. And the nests are indicators of that. In the American
tropics these wasps are subject to predation by birds, monkeys and so
they've evolved
visual camouflage. Other examples of disguise include this nest which was
taken from the side of a tree. Each of these are separate cones and
they're built on an envelope, the envelope of the preceding cone, so it's like
they're stories that are stacked. They can build one of these large nests
within two days, and that's because the nests are made by swarms of queens
accompanied by swarms of workers.
We have Kinsey's collection
because he grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, across the river, and got his
first entomological instruction
here at the American Museum, so when he died his collection was willed to us.
In addition to the the wasps, Kinsey collected many galls. We have a
collection now of more than seven
millions specimens. A gall is a structure made out of plant tissue.
The wasp comes along, lays an egg into the plant and the chemicals that
she injects when she's laying the egg
cause the plant to swell around it and produce these large growths that
the gall wasp larvae when it hatches starts to feed on.
If you're dealing with large numbers of very small objects, and you are
interested in the study of variation, you have to look at
a great many specimens.
And that's one reason that invertebrate zoology
has so many specimens. In fact,
entomology has the majority of the objects in the entire Museum's
collection,
about eighteen million
specimens are part of entomology.