Historical Sources of Collection Growth

During the Museum's first fifty years general collecting was emphasized on field trips in order to build a representative collection of North American insects useful for training students. From the 1920's to the early 1950's, R. H. Beamer led many summer expeditions, or extended field trips, chiefly to enhance the collection of nearctic Cicadellidae, but he and his students added thousands of miscellaneous insects as well as cicadellids to the Museum's holdings. During this same period, H. B. Hungerford's field studies, but more significantly his exchanges and purchases, vastly increased the representation of aquatic Hemiptera, the Museum's first important world-wide collection.

Purchase of private collections to enhance the Museum's specialized holdings has been uncommon but important. In 1966, for example, the Museum acquired by purchase the Z. Padr collection of European bees (including many from eastern Europe), to facilitate the research of C. D. Michener. As a result, the Snow Museum has the largest and best collection of European bees in America. It has been used by numerous bee specialists who have needed to compare Nearctic species and genera with those of Europe. Similarly, in the 1940's the large and important collection of Hemiptera assembled by J. R. de la Torre Bueno was purchased to improve the research capabilities of H. B. Hungerford and his students.

Exchanges have been a fairly frequent means of collection enhancement. F. H. Snow's exchange of rare tiger beetles for duplicate specimens of many taxa from collectors world-wide has become a legend in American entomology. Many years ago, we exchanged with the Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan, Orthoptera for Tipulidae, in order to have a nucleus of identified specimens of the latter group. Our collection of Tipulidae having grown considerably since then, we have recently exchanged with the British Museum to obtain European tipulids not already represented in our collection. There have been numerous other exchanges, in bees, leafhoppers, water bugs, staphylinid beetles and other groups, to broaden the Museum's representation and correspondingly to improve collections at other institutions.

Although the Museum has not historically specialized in tropical insects, we recognize the importance of sampling tropical species from habitats that are threatened with destruction and of preserving such materials and making them available to systematists. Additionally, recent emphasis on the Neotropics in the research programs of Ashe and his students has greatly expanded the museum's holdings of Neotropical Coleoptera. Also, M. S. Engel, and other staff members and students, of the Snow Entomological Museum, in cooperation with other apoid workers and the Universidad Nacional Autonomo de Mexico (UNAM), has significantly increased the Snow Museum's and UNAM's collections of Mexican bees.