Ben Marks of Collectors Weekly says: "With mosquito and bed-bug season upon us, Hunter Oatman-Stanford has written an article about the May Natural History Museum in Colorado Springs, where you will find some 7,000 insects, all safely behind behind glass. Hunter spoke to museum president R.J Speer, whose great-grandfather, James May, first started collecting bugs for the British Museum in the 19th century. Many of the museum's weirdest and rarest bugs are from that era."
The museum itself is an artifact from a bygone era, with its antique glass cases and handmade incandescent light fixtures. "It's a static display style one would expect to see in the 1940s or '50s," Steer says. "It's very old-fashioned. We don't have any electronic displays or interactive exhibits yet, but we're working on converting one room into a rotating display." Inadvertently, the collection documents the history of entomology through its artifacts from the niche world of insect hunters. "We still have some of the original specimen wrappings, things like pieces of local newspapers," says Steer. "The insect would be carefully folded up inside a small triangular paper football, and that might go inside a little cardboard matchbox, and then a series of those might be placed inside a cigar box."
