Your first month of entomology

Most insect collectors started by looking down in the grass and wondering what they just found. Here is the month that turns that curiosity into a real collection and a real skill.

By Colin B. · Published June 18, 2026

Entomology has a different learning curve than most hobbies. The first two weeks are mostly outside and mostly free: you are learning to see, learning to net, and learning where insects actually live. The second two weeks are mostly at a desk, and mostly humbling: pinning and spreading are real manual skills that take repetition to get right. The good news is that both halves are genuinely absorbing, and by the end of the month you will have actual specimens to show for it.

Here is what that first month actually looks like.

Week 1: Learn to see before you collect

The most useful thing you can do before buying a single piece of gear is to download iNaturalist and photograph insects for a week. Walk a meadow, a hedgerow, a weedy vacant lot, or your own backyard with your phone and submit every insect you can photograph. The AI identification and community expert review will start to build your mental map of what lives where.

This week answers a question you cannot answer from the internet: what is actually in your local area? The insects around a suburban lawn in Ohio are different from those around a rural property in Texas, and knowing your local fauna before you start collecting tells you what to expect and what to target.

You will also notice something quickly: insects are much more abundant than you thought. Once you start looking, you stop being able to stop. Every plant is a microhabitat. Every flower has regulars. Every patch of bare soil has its own residents.

By the end of the week, you will have a reasonable sense of what common butterflies, beetles, and flies look like in your area, and you will be ready to actually catch something.

Week 2: Your first net and your first catch

Order a 15-inch fine-mesh aerial net and a killing jar kit this week. While you are waiting for them, pick up a Peterson or Kaufman field guide and read the introductory sections on insect orders. You do not need to memorize them; you just need enough context to know that a beetle is different from a fly is different from a wasp, and what the basic structural differences look like.

When the gear arrives, go somewhere with open, sunny habitat: a meadow, a field edge, a garden in full bloom. Insects are ectothermic, meaning they are most active when warm, so the best collecting time is late morning through early afternoon on a clear day.

The netting technique takes a few sessions to feel natural. The basic swing is a figure-eight motion: sweep the net through the air where the insect is flying, then flip the net bag over the ring to trap the insect inside. The harder part is getting close enough without spooking the insect, and that improves with experience rather than instruction.

Your first week of collecting, aim for abundance rather than diversity. Target the common butterflies and larger beetles you identified during week one on iNaturalist. Catch, kill in the jar (takes 5-15 minutes), and keep in a small labeled envelope with the collection date and location until you are ready to mount.

A note on collecting ethics: catch only what you will mount. Killing insects for no reason serves no one. A well-maintained collection of 50 specimens you have identified and labeled is more meaningful than a jar of 200 random dead insects.

Week 3: Spreading and pinning

Spreading and pinning is the skill that actually takes practice, and the first few attempts will be humbling. Watch at least one 10-minute tutorial on YouTube before you start. The technique matters: push the pin through the correct location on the thorax, set the wings correctly on the spreading board, use strips of tracing paper to hold the wings flat, and leave the specimen to dry for 1-3 weeks without touching it.

The most common beginner mistakes:

• Rushing the drying time. A wing that curls while still pliable cannot be straightened without a relaxing box. Wait the full time, even when you are impatient to see the finished specimen.
• Using the wrong pin size. Size 2 pins work for most adult insects, but size 2 is too large for anything under about 5mm. Tiny insects need size 0 or 1 pins.
• Handling specimens without forceps. Your fingers oil the cuticle and break fragile antennae. Use fine-point forceps for every step.

Your first few spreads will not be perfect and that is fine. The skill improves fast with repetition. By the end of the week you will have 3-5 specimens in process and a clear sense of where the technique is clicking and where it needs work.

Week 4: Identification and your first display

With dried specimens in hand, open the field guide and start identifying. The Peterson guide uses a family-level key that walks you through the structural features that define each group: wing venation, leg structure, antenna shape. Work through it methodically. You will not always get to species, but getting to family or genus is genuinely satisfying and is the same level of resolution that most citizen-science platforms work at anyway.

Label each specimen with at minimum: collection date, location (GPS coordinates or town and state), and your own name or initials. These data are what make a specimen scientifically useful rather than just decorative. A specimen without locality data has essentially no scientific value.

Set up your first Riker mount or entomology display box. Arrange specimens by order or by family, label them neatly, and seal the case. Put a small naphthalene mothball inside any closed case to deter dermestid beetles, which are tiny carpet-beetle relatives that can silently destroy an unprotected collection.

What happens at month two

By the end of your first month you have the fundamentals: you can net, kill, spread, pin, and make a basic identification. Month two is when the collecting starts to become genuinely systematic. A few things that will meaningfully improve your skills from here:

• Vary your habitat. If you have been collecting open meadow, try a woodlot edge, a stream margin, or a wet area. The species change dramatically with habitat, and variety is how you build a diverse collection.
• Join a regional entomological society. Most states have one. Their field trips introduce you to habitats and species you would not find on your own, and the experts at these events are almost universally glad to help beginners ID specimens.
• Submit to BugGuide.net. Upload photos of your best-looking mounted specimens for expert community ID. Many species require a specialist to get to the correct name, and BugGuide connects you with exactly those people.

The hobby rewards patience and curiosity in roughly equal measure. By month four or five, you will start to develop genuine taxonomic preferences: the group or the habitat that pulls you back every weekend. That specialization is when the hobby shifts from interesting to genuinely gripping.

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Ready to buy your first net and pins? See our entomology gear guide for the five things worth buying first and the equipment you can skip entirely.