Hello Beetle Queen empire! I’ve kindly been invited to post here, so I thought I’d start with a bit about grasshoppers, since a voracious swarm is currently making an all-you-can-eat buffet out of the eastern Wyoming and Montana hay, wheat and alfalfa crops, a topic I recently wrote about at my own blog.
In her film, [...]

Please join me in welcoming our next guest blogger, Jennifer Frazer. Jennifer writes the awesome and amazing science blog, The Artful Amoeba. She has a true knack for the ever-rare talent of communicating to both the layperson and academic alike. And her subjects often seem geared not just toward education, but towards wonder.
Jennifer and [...]

Mealworm Cricket Empanadas with Cilantro Yogurt Sauce
Prep Time: 30 minutes / Cook Time: 40 minutes / Total Time: 70 minutes / Makes appox. 14 empanadas

The question that I get asked the most is: How did you become interested in starting a project about eating insects? I don’t think it was necessarily a single moment for me, but rather an accumulation of things—surging food movements, exposure to cultural practices through personal travels and various media outlets, self-reflection, and my personal [...]

Hello world and thanks to Jessica for allowing me to be a guest blogger. Like those of you out there who are waiting for Beetle Queen to come to your city, I am also anticipating the screening to make its way to SF!
So who am I anyways? I’ve been advocating entomophagy, or the consumption [...]

I am excited to welcome our next guest blogger, Rosanna Yau of minilivestock.org. Turns out Rosanna and I have a lot more in common than just bugs. Like Beetle Queen, Rosanna’s work uses insects explore larger themes. Her philosophies are surprisingly aligned with those expressed in the film - but whether or [...]

I’m so delighted to be a guest-blogger with Myriapod Productions! I’m an ecologist with a love of the spineless, so Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo is a film that is right up my alley. I think that I have a lot in common with Jessica Oreck…our love of nature and our overall respect for [...]

I recently had the chance to correspond (via email) with Dr. Carin Bondar and she has agreed to write a guest post on the BQ blog. To learn more about her and read more of her work you may visit her site www.carinbondar.com.
And be sure to check out her fascinating piece posted here tomorrow!

Visiting New Orleans for the New Orleans Film Festival, I had the pleasure of hanging out with the house entomologist of Audubon Insectarium, Zack Lemann. Our last guest blogger, Rachael Teel, covered a bit about the Insectarium in her final entry, but I thought Zack could add an insider’s perspective. Listen to the [...]

In 1984, famed entomologist E.O. Wilson popularized the term biophilia, which he defined as “the innate tendency [in humans] to focus on life and lifelike processes.” [1] Expanding on this theory in a later publication, Wilson argued that biophilia and its inverse - biophobia - each provoke an emotional response. [2] He also maintained that [...]

Contemporary zoos are cultural constructions that confine, catalog, domesticate, and translate the natural world. These institutions are not reflections of nature - they are reflections of Western society’s ever-changing conception of nature. For this reason, zoos should be recognized as tangible records of the shifting meanings that have shaped human-animal and human-environment relations for hundreds [...]

The method of organization embodied and shaped by the curiosity cabinet was also prevalent in the emerging natural history museums of the late nineteenth century. With their glass front cases, bottles, and drawers, cabinets and museums both employed a system of understanding that “represented a shift from delighting in the world’s strange offerings and the [...]

Enthusiasm for the acquisition and display of natural and man-made objects proliferated throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These collections, as well as the medieval treasuries and church repositories that preceded them, are considered by many to be direct ancestors of the modern natural history museum. [1]

The newest member of the Beetle Queen team, Ms Rachael Teel, will be treating us to a series of posts on the historical and philosophical context of nature in museum settings throughout the western world. Although Japan has, in the past few centuries, followed our methodology in this area, the underlying principles of the depiction [...]

May 1983 saw the extremely minor release of a 6 song Flexi-Disc, Alone. No personnel are listed, giving the impression that it is Tsuchiya alone playing the instruments on this record. Whether that is true or not, it is a lonely, beautiful, rich record whose merits have gone unsung.