A palace in Belgium puts a new spin on the term “Green Building Material” with the use of 1.4 million green jewel beetle wings to adorn a ceiling. The Hall of Mirrors (2002) is an instillation by artist Jan Fabre in the Royal Palace of Brussels that took over 3 months to make and 30 assistants to assemble.


Image Credit: Angelos.be


People unfamiliar with insect exoskeleton may believe a material like this won’t last, but in an interview with Sculpture Magazine, Jan explains:

I use strong materials, which happen to have a fragile appearance. The color of those beetle shells will never fade, for the outer integument contains chitin, one of the strongest and lightest materials on earth, which was used for objects destined for the Mir space station.

Image Credit: Scultpture.org (close up of beetles)


The next question one may ask - Where does someone get 1.4 million beetle wings? I discovered this on a recent trip to Thailand and found that this beetle is very abundant and prepared as a food! Anyone visiting Bangkok will see many of the fried insect dishes and this beetle is eaten by the ton. The colorful wings are discarded before this unique protein dish is prepared. What a great use for an animal by product!

You can see more of this artist’s work at: The website of Jan Fabre.

Tags: jewel beetles, architecture

For ancient Egyptians beetles were an integral part of daily life, burials and mythology. Darkling beetles, Prionotheca coronata, have been found in entombed pottery jars, stone vessels themselves were sometimes carved in the shape of beetles, click beetles, Agrypnus notodonta, were depicted alongside a fetish of the goddess Neith, and gold pendants shaped like jewel beetles, Acmaeodera polita and Steraspis squamosa, were popular during the Old Kingdom. When the Egyptians realized that the creatures could damage a corpse a spell was added to the Book of the Dead meant for repelling the destructive creatures:

“Begone from me, O Crooked-lips! I am Khnum, Lord of Peshnu, who dispatches the words of the gods to Re, and I report affairs to their master”.

However, the beetle most important to the Egyptians was Scarabeus sacer, the dung beetle whose habit of rolling up dung into a ball where it lays its eggs reminded the Egyptians of the daily travels of the sun across the sky. The apparent spontaneous generation of larvae was associated with their god Khepra or Khepri who was also capable of self generation and renewal. Khepri was also thought to push the sun across the sky and down into the underworld at night, only to reappear each morning.

It is not surprising that the hieroglyph representing the dung beetle was read kheper and as a verb meant to create or to come into being. This hieroglyph was used to write Khepri’s name and in fact the deity was often depicted as having a beetle either on or for a head.
During the New Kingdom kheper took on yet another aspect as a sacred symbol. Large amulets featuring a scarab on one side and a spell on the other were placed over the heart of a mummy. As such, the amulets were referred to as heart scarabs. The spell on the back was also from the Book of the Dead (spell 30) and read,

"O my heart which I had from my mother, O my heart which I had upon earth, do not rise up against me as a witness in the presence of the Lord of Things; do not speak against me concerning what I have done, do not bring up anything against me in the presence of the Great God, Lord of the West."

ABOVE PICTURE OF BEETLE IS AVAILABLE: http://www.etsy.com/listing/67923853/framed-scarab-beetle-with-egyptian-money

I’ve listed some of the resources I used to research this article as they may be of interest to lovers of beetles and ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt Online is a particularly good resource if you are interested in further exploring the culture, religion, mythology and literature of ancient Egypt.

While not referenced for the article you may want to visit the Pyramid Texts Online where you can read the complete text in English or view the Hieroglyphs in their entirety. A number of other important works are available at that site as well, including the Rosetta stone and E.A. Wallis Budge’s Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary.

Ancient Egypt: The Mythology
http://www.egyptianmyths.net/

Ancient Egypt Online
http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/khepri.html

Beetles and the decline of the Old Kingdom: Climate change in ancient Egypt by Miroslav Barta
http://cuni.academia.edu/MiroslavBarta/Papers/139985/Beetles_and_the_decline_of_the_Old_Kingdom_Climate_change_in_ancient_Egypt

The Book of The Dead
http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/ebod/

The Book of The Dead Plate XVI featuring chapter 30 found on heart scarabs
http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/ebod/ebod23.htm

Khepri Wikipedia Article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khepri

Tags: egyptian beetles, scarabs, mythology

Amazing stop motion film from 1912 with insects.



Władysław Starewicz (August 8, 1882 - February 26, 1965) was a stop-motion animator and director of Russian origins, via Poland. His early work began while the Director of the Museum of Natural History in Kovno, Lithuania, where he produced several short documentaries. For his fifth film he wanted to shoot two stag beetles fighting. Stag beetles are however nocturnal which posed a problem. When Starewicz wanted to film them he needed to use lights, which caused the stag beetles to go to sleep. He did not give up however, and decided that he could re-create the battle by attaching wire legs to the creatures, thereby using them as stop-motion puppets. This was only the first of many stop-motion shorts and feature length films.
 
Throughout his life Starewicz produced 66 films, some of his best known works are perhaps The Beautiful Leukanida (1912), The Grasshopper and the Ant (1911), The Tale of the Fox (1939), which may remind contemporary audiences of The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and perhaps the most famous of his productions, The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912).
 
The Cameraman’s Revenge is about a married couple, two beetles, who feel their home life is not as exciting as it could be. Each spouse is unfaithful, the husband with a dancing dragonfly and the wife with an artist friend and beetle. In a meta-commentary that would make even the most severe cinephile giggle the dragonfly’s jilted lover, a grasshopper, is also a cameraman. Mr. Grasshopper packs up his large box camera and follows the dragonfly and Mr. Beetle to a hotel where he catches them in the act, making sure to get an establishing shot before some intimate close-ups through a key hole. This film returns in the final act to plague Mr. Beetle when he takes his wife to a movie where Mr. Grasshopper shows his masterpiece before the audience. Even by today’s standards the animation is superb. Of course, fans and readers of Bug will enjoy the use of beetles and other insects as puppets. (R.Payne)

Tags: insect movies, beetle

A local scientist has been stopping by the Bug Studio to pick up various insects to photograph with a Nikon camera that includes a auto-montage microscope set-up. The results have been amazing and I want to share some of the photographs. One can really see the amazing architecture and color of these ancient creatures.

The weevil family is one of my favorites because of this group's characteristic long neck, which helps me humanize these insects in my miniature insect dioramas. Under a microscope, a whole new world is revealed.

Pictured below is a beetle from the Eupholus genus.



Below is a photograph of this beetle above photographed with auto-montage.




The Leopard Lacewing, Cethosia biblis, is a ornate butterfly that has a range from India to Asia, and has been used in my collaboration with the Poetry Store (picture below).




This same butterfly below with Auto-Montage.

Tags: microscope, photography, beetle

I had the pleasure of screening a unique insect film called “Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo”, a film that unveils Japan’s appreciation and love affair with insects. Beetle Queen takes you on a historical journey that unveils insects prominent and endearing standing in Japanese culture. Narrated with frequent poetic prose (film is subtitled) that features various examples of how insects influence Japanese society and culture; from pet stores and fruit stands that sell fighting beetles, to their philosophies on nature and harmony. I highly recommend this film for anyone who wants to see how another culture perceives (and loves) insects. This film will be on PBS May 17th, but check your local listings as times may vary. To learn more, visit this interactive website about the film.

Tags: movie, beetle

“it’s only when you look closely at an ant through a magnifying glass on a sunny day that you realize how often they burst into flames” - Harry Hill

Tags: ants

Monarch butterflies are probably the best-known species of butterfly in North America. They are famous for their long migrations south before the northern winter frosts kill their eggs and adults. These migrations are one of the most amazing in nature and individuals can travel up to 2,000 miles from home. In North America, the migration patterns differ depending on where the butterfly lives. Monarchs living in the western part of the US migrate to a small number of sites scattered along the coast of California. One of these sites is close to where I live in San Francisco, called Pacific Grove. The most famous travelers come from the eastern US where an estimated 100 million butterflies head south to Michoacan in central Mexico.

These journeys are very tough on the Monarch and most of them do not make the whole journey. However, many stop to breed along the way and the butterflies that make the reverse migration in spring are often five generations removed from those that originally migrated in autumn. Along these migrations, Monarchs lay eggs on milkweed, which is the only plant their caterpillars will eat. It is from this milkweed diet that the butterfly gets its toxic defense. Milkweed contains poisonous cardiac glycosides that the Monarch sequesters when the caterpillar eats the plant. These glycosides cause severe vomiting in most animals that eats either a monarch caterpillar or the adult butterfly.

BugUnderGlass creates a museum quality framed Monarch Butterfly display made from farm-raised Monarchs that are not taken from wild populations.

Tags: monarch butterfly, butterfly

Let me introduce Tank. Tank just moved here from Madagascar and is really grumpy (I know this because hissing cockroaches hiss when they are mad - and tank hisses a lot); hence his give name - Cantankerous. We just call him Tank. And you can’t blame Tank for being grumpy with three missing forearms, a half broken antennae, and currently living in a room with a women cockroach about to have 15 babies. Furthermore, he is a cockroach, which are hated by most.



Despite his reasonable reasons for being grumpy, Tank is here to teach us something about his fascinating family, who have been around the block a lot longer than most animals. In the upcoming months, Tank will demonstrate and share some of the amazing attributes of cockroaches. I promise you will never look at a cockroach the same again.

Today Tank is going to give you a little background on his family ancestry. Tank is a cockroach and a member of the Blattodea insect order, which contains 4,000 other known cockroach species. Tank’s ancestry goes back farther than the dinosaurs and the earliest cockroach-like fossil relatives appeared about 325 million years ago. Tanks closest relative is the termitie, which most scientists believe evolved from cockroaches about 100 million years ago. Realizing being related to termites does not help his PR, Tank has hired me to convince you his family is cool.

Tags: tank, cockroach