Invertebrate Zoology.

Both part of the hymenoptera, the ants, bees and wasps.

One collection, housed in these half-height cabinets down this corridor,

is the wasp nest collection, which is the worlds largest.

The other collection, housed in these cabinets,

is the gall wasp collection of Alfred Kinsey, who studied gall wasps well

before he started studying human sexuality. Social wasps are very familiar

to people

and have been

since time immemorial.

Possibly humans got the idea for making paper from watching wasps chew wood

and mixing it with saliva. This is a complicated beautiful structure,

and it's made by a group of insects that have a brain about the size

of a pin head.

Now, to make something that complex, all of these insects have to have a complex

society. And the nests are indicators of that. In the American

tropics these wasps are subject to predation by birds, monkeys and so

they've evolved

visual camouflage. Other examples of disguise include this nest which was

taken from the side of a tree. Each of these are separate cones and

they're built on an envelope, the envelope of the preceding cone, so it's like

they're stories that are stacked. They can build one of these large nests

within two days, and that's because the nests are made by swarms of queens

accompanied by swarms of workers.

We have Kinsey's collection

because he grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, across the river, and got his

first entomological instruction

here at the American Museum, so when he died his collection was willed to us.

In addition to the the wasps, Kinsey collected many galls. We have a

collection now of more than seven

millions specimens. A gall is a structure made out of plant tissue.

The wasp comes along, lays an egg into the plant and the chemicals that

she injects when she's laying the egg

cause the plant to swell around it and produce these large growths that

the gall wasp larvae when it hatches starts to feed on.

If you're dealing with large numbers of very small objects, and you are

interested in the study of variation, you have to look at

a great many specimens.

And that's one reason that invertebrate zoology

has so many specimens. In fact,

entomology has the majority of the objects in the entire Museum's

collection,

about eighteen million

specimens are part of entomology.