I’m going to start this post off by saying I really don’t like bugs! Little creepy crawlies give me the shivers and at home I have to have my husband take responsibility for evicting any spiders that might have strayed into the house. However, at work I have to resist the urge to freak out at the sight of insects as monitoring them is regularly part of the job. From my point of view I’m thankful it’s not something I’m directly involved in and my thanks go out to my colleague Hannah Clare for the text below.
Collection care team identifying insects
The Collection Care Department manages an insect pest monitoring scheme that uses over 120 insect blunder traps. These have no attractant pheromone lure and simply collect insects as they walk across the trap’s sticky surface; they are the most commonly used insect traps in museums, libraries and archives as they provide a reflection of the number of insects to be found in a particular area.
The traps are laid out in a grid-like fashion in all document storage areas at The National Archives and once every quarter a team collect all the traps and exchange them for fresh ones. Then the process of examination of the traps, identification of the insects, counting and recording all the data begins. To help us identify what type of insects we have on the traps, we use a set of images of the most common pests found in heritage collections and compare them to what we see under the microscope. We have to research any we don’t recognise to make sure we identify all our finds correctly.