Collection Facilities
The major portions of the National Collections of Insects and Mites are stored at the three locations specified in the introduction: NMNH (National Museum of Natural Hitory), BARC (Building 005, BARC-West), and MSC (Museum Support Center).
NMNH
Collections at the NMNH have recently been moved or are about to be moved to improved quarters. The Hymenoptera, Diptera, and Coleoptera are are now on the 5th, 6th, and 7th floors, respectively of the East Court of the NHB. In the summer of 2001, the Lepidoptera, Heteroptera, and Auchenorrhynca collections will be moved to the 5th floor of the NHB's East Wing (the part of the building surrounding the East Court).
East Court
In the East Court, the insect cabinets are fitted into space-saving compactors, which sit in the center of each floor, with office spaces and other rooms on the periphery. The compactors rows rest on wheels riding on tracks imbedded in the floors, and electric motors control the opening and closing of aisles between the rows. To reduce the volume of storage space consumed by cabinets as opposed to contents, the cabinets were designed with double doors that close against a single center column. In addition, the doors have recessed handles, which permit an additional cabinet row per floor. In all, compactors increase the quantity of specimen drawers that can be stored on each of the East Court floors by about 30%; the number of drawers accommodated is approximately 54,000 or about 18,000 per floor.
Views of compactor rails in floor (left) &
cabinet rows in motion (right) as one aisle is closed and another opened
Open compactor aisle (left) &
drawers being loaded into a compactor cabinet (right)
Each collection floor in the East Court floor also has a specially constructed room for storage of specimens preserved in alcohol and a room for shared literature files pertinent to the groups stored on that floor.
Cabinets in an East Court alcohol specimen room
East Wing
The 5th floor of the East Wing has similar facilities, except that there are no compactors. Double-doored cabinets with recessed handles have been used for about half of the Lepidoptera collection to conserve space. Otherwise, the type of steel cabinets in the East Wing are like the standard steel ones that gradually were purchased by NMNH and SEL to replace older steel and wood cabinets, starting about 25 years ago.
Views of a standard cabinet (left) and a section of drawers (right)
The cabinets used for pinned specimens, such as those pictured above, are designed to hold USNM-style specimen drawers. The drawers hold pinning trays of various sizes, as shown below.
Section of a USNM-style drawer and pinning trays
Groups housed on the 5th floor of the East Wing include Lepidoptera, Heteroptera, Auchenorrhyncha, and Arachnida. The Entomology Section of the NMNH Library is also located there.
BARC
All insect and mite collections stored at BARC were moved to the basement of Building 005 of the Center in October of 1999. At the same time, collections of most Orthopteroid insects (including Isoptera) were moved there from NMNH.
Pinned specimens stored at BARC are in non-compacted standard cabinets as pictured above. Specimens mounted on glass microscope slides (the majority of the specimens at BARC) are stored in slide cabinets or in slide boxes arranged on standard steel or wooden book shelving. The termites, which are mostly in alcohol, are stored in steel alcohol cabinets housed in a room separate from other parts of the collection.
Views of slide cabinets (left, foreground) &
shelves with slide boxes (right)
Microscope slide-mounts of minute insects in a slide box
MSC
The collections at the MSC constitute roughly 20% of insect holdings. Some of the groups stored entirely at MSC are the mosquitoes and other biting flies, crane flies, lice, fleas, ichneumonid wasps, saturniid and sphingid moths, an papilionid butterflies. Cabinets used at MSC for storage of pinned specimens are like the standard steel cabinets used at NMNH and BARC except that they are shorter because the ceiling height in the collection pods of the MSC facility is not sufficient to accomodate the full-height cabinets.