[music playing] LAURA PORTURAS: Entomology is the study of insects and their relatives.

There's a million known species of insects, and somewhere between one and 10 million more that are unknown.

[music playing] The museum is located at 160 Curtain Road.

It's directly across the street from the Birkie Creamery, and it's open from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM Monday through Fridays.

Stuart Frost, who was an entomology professor at Penn State, had a large reference collection of insects that he donated to the Department.

And then another faculty named Casey Kim worked to get that collection officially recognized as a museum.

[music playing] We have a number of exhibits, and they range from how entomologists go in the field and collect insects, how they're prepared.

And then we have some other things that are relevant to projects that are going on in our college.

We have an exhibit on honey bees, the spotted lanternfly behind me, and galling wasps.

We have one that showcases the diversity of insects that can be found in Pennsylvania.

People are often surprised about some of the crazy-looking insects that can be found in their own backyard.

[music playing] The insect collections are held next door to the public space.

In this room, we have about 1.3 million specimens that are preserved and used for research and education.

[music playing] There's this set of specimens here that I ran across not that long ago.

And I thought, oh my God, those are crazy-looking!

Where are they from?

And then all of the labels say that they're from Pennsylvania.

This collection and other collections like it are really important for being able to document and monitor biodiversity and provide record of what exists, where, and when.

We have stuff from the mid-1800s up until things that were collected last week.

The collection is growing a lot.

Every year, there's probably 2,000 specimens that get deposited in the museum built from students.

Our museum probably has about a quarter of the specimens digitized at this point.

And so we have a lot of work to do to try to get the rest of that information on the web.

But it's well worth it because it means that people are aware of what's here, and they can use our information.

The museum itself is involved in different types of research because people use specimens for all sorts of different things.

We've been approached by folks in different fields who are interested in putting exhibits together as part of outreach associated with their research.

It's nice to be able to share ideas and projects because a lot of people think that entomology happens in isolation, but it definitely doesn't.

It helps to bring to light that insects are relevant to maybe more than people think about on a day-to-day basis.

I think there's a lot of small things that are worked into these exhibits that help highlight their importance to humans and our society.

[end music]