Welcome
Housed in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology and the College of Agriculture and Life Science, the NCSU Insect Museum is a research collection dedicated to the acquisition and preservation of resources in systematic entomology useful to the NCSU Department of Entomology, the citizens of North Carolina, and the broader systematics community. We also host the Treehoppers website (Deitz and Wallace) and PDFs of T.B. Mitchell's two volume set The Bees of the Eastern United States published in 1960 (part I) and 1962 (part II).
Click the search button below to search our collection database.
Explore and annotate our virtual collection at GigaPan.org!
Support
We recently established a Friends of the NCSU Insect Museum program and a small but growing endowment. Your contributions enable us to fund student research, acquire critical resources, understand insect diversity, and enhance the public education aspects of our mission.
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Museum Overview
The NC State University Insect Museum is an internationally recognized resource for the study of insects and mites from North Carolina, the Southeastern United States, and, in several insect groups, the world. Our holdings are partitioned into four main collections:
- NC State University Insect Collection - the vast majority of our specimens are housed in the research collection. Drawers can be browsed virtually through our GigaPan user profile.
- Genome Bank - our cold storage collection for specimens used in molecular analyses.
- NC State University Teaching Collection - approximately 60 drawers of insects used in our insect systematics course (ENT 502).
- NC State University Outreach Collection - approximately 8 drawers used for outreach.
With close to 1,750,000 prepared specimens, the Museum is vital to our Department, University, and State, serving a variety of research, extension, outreach, and teaching activities. Holdings of North Carolina insects and of Hemiptera are especially outstanding. The worldwide collection of non-heteropteran Hemiptera, along with NCSU's extensive literature collections on these lineages, form an unduplicated resource for research on these insects. The NCSU Insect Collection has several other outstanding research collections (mainly Lepidoptera, Acari, Anthophila (the bees), Diptera, Coleoptera, Heteroptera, Orthoptera, and Collembola) within it and associated assemblages of literature that are of international importance.
Information
We are a CITES registered research facility (permit: 08US827653/9), and our LSID [link] is urn:lsid:biocol.org:col:1024. Loans and other correspondence concerning specimens should be made through this address and e-mail:
NC State University Insect Museum Department of Entomology & Plant Pathology 4321 Gardner Hall, Box 7613 NC State University Raleigh, NC 27695-7613 USA |
phone: +1 919 515 3595 fax: +1 919 515 7746 email (@ncsu.edu): bob_blinn |