hi this is mindy lighthipe and i'm going to give you this short tutorial about collecting beetles and what is the best way to rehydrate them and preserve them here i have a beetle in a riker mount the riker man is about an inch and it's filled with cotton in the background and there's a glass plate over the top and the pins come in on the side and the beetle is nestled down underneath there's no pins or anything in it and it's preserved very well here if you were to purchase something like this the spreading and the manipulation of the body and the riker mount it can end up being costly and many times people who collect insects will opt to buy them unspread and unmounted so i just wanted to go through a little brief tutorial on how you can do this yourself traditionally a beetle will come in in a little plastic wrap like this usually with a staple on it or whatnot and the legs are folded up because they're easily broken and so this is you know can be kind of not as exciting as the mount that i just showed you but it is cost efficient to learn to spread your own i have some little flower beetles here and they came in a little plastic container they also came in with a little cushioning of cotton and it's my suggestion that you take the cotton out of the packaging the cotton has little fibers on it and the fibers will stick to the tiny little claws on the beetle and it will present a difficult scenario for you when you're trying to get the cotton away and the cotton is wet so now what's happened is these were a little bit crumpled up and i'm not sure exactly why this happened but some of the legs have broken off and it's important that you want to keep those as an illustrator and not maybe a collector these can be invaluable because you can actually look at them through a microscope or a handheld magnifier and so you don't want to lose them you also can if you get really good you can glue them back on traditionally this is the way a beetle will come that is not mounted you want to get yourself a plastic container that has a lid and you want to make sure that the lid seals up pretty tight so that it's like a vacuum packed anything like a tupperware or anything now if you notice this one is very small i'm going to be using a small one because i feel that it's better to have a smaller container where there'd be more compressed humidity opposed to a larger container i've gone to the sink and i took some bounty paper towel i put it under the sink and i completely saturated the paper towel with water and then i went underneath the sink and i bunched it up and i pressed it so that all the water came out you do not want the paper towel to be sopping wet you want it to be really moist and damp but not super wet and sopping you can rip off a little section and you're going to place it's almost like making lasagna you're going to place some down at the bottom and then you're going to take your beetle and you're going to place it inside the container and then you're going to fold up lightly the paper towel around it you don't want to press the paper towel too deeply or embed it into the legs but you do want to make sure that it's completely sealed around so that you're forming a nice humid scenario then you're going to put the top on and make sure that it's sealed properly so you hear that little pop that means that it's there and then you're going to let the beetle sit for at least 24 hours in 24 hours i'm going to come back and open this up and i'm going to test it and i'll start you know another video for you so that you can see whether or not the beetle is ready to actually be repositioned and this is really important the larger the insect the more time it needs for humidity to go through it if you try to reposition the legs and it's not rehydrated things will break off and it will not work these are only about an inch big and i think that it's probably going to be at least a day and possibly two days so another recommendation is that you know when you're going to do this so let's say if you wanted to work over the weekend and you had plans that say you wanted to do this on saturday i would suggest that you start hydrating at least thursday evening this way they would be ready for you and you wouldn't be disappointed and have them be too stiff to work with okay that's it for now and we'll be back to test this okay the beetles have been in the container for two days i checked them after 24 hours and the body uh was very stiff the legs began to move but i felt that it was important to keep it in for a little bit extra time so i'm opening up my container and i've got it's still really moist and so that's a good indication that it's it's doing its its job the other thing that you want to make sure is that if you leave it in too long or there's too much moisture you can grow mold i live in florida and it can be very humid so i have to be very mindful that i don't leave it in for too long because it actually will be a little container for growing mold it'll become a science project instead of an insect pinning demonstration so i had them down at the bottom here and you can use a pair of tweezers these are specifically made for insects they're not sharp at the end and they have sort of a curve to them see how they kind of go up and when you can kind of come in and dig up underneath and pick up your specimen okay so this beetle pretty much looks the way it did coming out of the package and as you can see the legs are turned in close under the body and they do this for protection when they're shipping them so that there's less breakage so what you want to do is you want to make sure that the joints are flexible and you can kind of maybe put your thumb lightly in the middle of your beetle and then come in and you want to just sort of grab in the mid-range area which is the tibia and you want to kind of move it back and forth you might actually hear a little snapping noise and it's almost like a joint cracking so if you think about if you've got knees that crack this might also happen here and it's just a little snap and then they should begin to move and this is what you're looking for if when you go to open it up and it's not moving it means that it has not hydrated enough so you're just going to kind of loosen each leg up and this little guy is missing part of his tarsus here and this looks like the insect that is missing this back leg so there are some body parts missing but there are plenty that are still intact that we can work with now the other thing is that underneath the protective casing which is called in elytra these two panels coleoptera in latin means shield wing and these are the shield they're almost like a volkswagen or a car where these will pop open so you actually have to come in and you can be pretty tough with these because this is made this is like a keratin like your fingernail and you can come in with a pair of tweezers and get up underneath and sort of pop the hood of each one and kind of move them off to the side so you're going to lift them up and this was one of the reasons why i knew that the the body was not ready because these did not pop up now underneath here there are these wings and these are you could not do this with a butterfly wing but you can do it with a beetle up underneath here are the wings that have folded and so what we're going to do is we're going to actually place this on a spreading board and i'm going to pin them down so that you can have them see what they look like when the wings are up so now that i've gotten this side out i'm going to turn the body and lift this up expose the folded wing underneath and pull this out and they're really really nice about how they just kind of fold up underneath you can also if you don't have tweezers you could use one of your insect pins that are in your little kit and you don't want to poke through you could actually even just use the round edge which is the head of the pin and sort of pull it out because you don't want to rip or tear anything and then kind of just give it a tug and the wing will come out like that so that's that's pretty cool the next step is to take your spreading board and here we have an inexpensive one which is styrofoam and you literally this ridge here is for butterflies bodies or any insect that would have a butter and actually an abdomen this is all attached so he's literally just going to sit on the surface here or if this is if he seems like he's tilting you can actually just put him this way and not go into the crevice in order to secure the beetle to the styrofoam and to be able to work with it you need to put a pin through the thorax i have um holding down the major portion of the thorax and abdomen and there's an area right underneath the head this is also part of the thorax and i'm going to take one of the heavier pins which is number three and i'm going to place it partially to the left of the thorax and press down now because the beetle is very stiff and hard you're going to have to put a lot of pressure and you can don't keep it in your hand because you could press down and stab yourself what i've done is i'm just taking this into the styrofoam and i'm pushing straight down until it goes through and now it's through the body and i can now place it on the styrofoam board and it will it's still going to pivot and move but at least it will be relatively flat at this point you can come in and you can position the legs and because this beetle is missing some legs they're not all going to be apparent but this one is a good example and to get this leg to stay this way you're just going to place at an angle a pin and then you're going to come in in the opposite direction so that it crosses over and it will secure that down so you're actually taking the pins and coming in at an angle this way this back leg here is also intact so i'm going to place this one where i want it hold it down and then take a pin in one angle and then coming in in the opposite angle this helps to secure it i'm going to use the tweezers to lift up so that i can have easier access to the wings and you can use your tweezers to pull the wing out and because this is not a scaled wing it's actually more like cellophane you can use your hand to gently pull the wing out into the position and get it unfolded my pins are a little awkward but have to manage so actually pulling it up higher will help it now you want to make them even and you also don't want to damage the wings so i've pre-cut some tracing vellum into one inch by looks like four inch strips and you're going to take your pin and you can come right into where the wing joins the body and up at the top there's a ridge where there are some veins and i'm using the point of the pin and i'm moving the whole wing into the position that i'd like to see it be in and that's going to be approximately slightly lower than 90 degrees this one is too high and i want to get this one up a little bit higher once i've gotten that into position i'm going to place the tracing paper over the top press down and then pin through the tracing paper this way the beetle wing will stay in this position the other side actually is looking pretty good you can play around and position it if you want if you want it to be a little bit lower you can just tap it and you can come in now if for some reason the legs the pins that i put here you can slightly move this over and drag your leg over the top and pin and then the tracing paper allows you to be able to see through where you're positioning and so you can continue to play with this if you want you can also position the elytra higher up so what i'm doing is i'm lifting up and pinning underneath and then i can come in in the opposite direction and lift this part of the elite up and cross it so this is your basic positioning and pinning and you're going to leave this for at least 24 hours before you take the pins off okay i hope this helps i hope that this short video will inspire you to collect beetles and to pin them on your own it's really can be very rewarding and after you get the hang of it it actually becomes quite simple for more information about my online courses and illustration tips visit my website at www.mindylighthype.com you can also see demonstrations on my youtube channel and you can also see me on instagram with works in progress i look forward to sharing the beauty of nature with you get out into the wilderness and explore