Being fascinated by a range and diversity of Manchester Museum’s galleries and exhibitions, many of our visitors want then to visit a particular Museum’s store in order to know more about the collections deposited behind-the-scenes and/or people working there. The Manchester Museum’s Entomology store retaining some 2.5 million specimens of insects is a usual place for visits not only by specialists-entomologists but also by art, design or photography students. Photographic reports resulting from such visits are always welcomed by the staff, as they show how different maybe a visitor’s view compared to what we can think of as a usual place and/or routine practice. Here is a short report received from one of our visitors, George Burgess, a first-year photography student, who visited the Entomology store in late Nov 2013.
“For my first-year photography assignment I was producing photograms – images made without a camera – using bugs. On a visit to the museum, Dmitri’s display in the Manchester Gallery caught my eye and I wanted to know more. It was really interesting to visit the department and see how everything is labelled and the large quantities of insects.”
View of the entomology store and one of our reference collections of British butterflies
There are hundreds of store-boxes containing thousands of undetermined insects; Dmitri, the curator, is holding a draw of undetermined parasitoid British wasps
Besides insect collections, the Manchester Museum’s Entomology department retains related archives that originated from the people who used to work in the Museum or who donated their collections
Entomology Manchester 