Frozen Bugs - An Alternative way to Kill Jars and prepare Specimens for Pinning
Which luckily freezers seem to always be accessible. Once we capture an insect, either dead or injured, we put them in our jars, or mom's makeshift bug envelope and freeze them. Freezing is a nice humane method. The insect nearly instantly gets drowsy / gets stunned from the cold. Their so small, the chill affects them instantly. The freezer method is also sterile because the jars (which we clean with soap and water after each capture) don't use chemicals like with traditional kill jars. Any bacteria the insects carry is within the safety of the jar.
In this picture I removed the lid and one fly for a size example. As always, I prefer plastic jars when working with my kids. We simply keep and clean plastic containers from what we love to eat - Nutella containers (with the paper lining from the inner lid removed), a Polish mustard jar (I make my awesome salad dressing with it & of course use a schmear on grilled Polish Sausage), and the blue point is a quickly made envelope (from paper we looked for when we found the Western Conifer Hemiptera).
