My Newest "Pet" Addition

Some girls got jewelry, books, and pretty things for Christmas, while I got those things, I also got flesh eating BUGS for Christmas!!! I have been wanting dermestid beetles for a while now and was ecstatic when I opened one of my Christmas gifts from my brother and found care instructions for dermestid beetles. I knew my sister had dropped a hint to him that I wanted to start a colony of dermestid beetles but had no idea he really was getting them for me. If you don't really know anything about them they are small beetles that look like this:Most of the ones in the picture are still in their larvae stages but there are a few adults. These creatures are harmless to the living but love the dead. They will clean a carcass until there is nothing but bone left. They work marvelously fast considering their size and are a skeleton builder's dream. They are regularly used by museums to clean carcasses. So to get back to my story. My brother did some research and found a reputable seller on Ebay and bought me 500 beetles. He had them shipped to his mother for her to care for until he was in town for Christmas. Lucky for all of us, his mother enjoys interesting critters as much as I do so she didn't mind caring for them. To make a long story short, this Christmas ranked as one of the best ones ever.
I have now had these lovely creatures for a month and have put them to good use since the holidays ended. They have already completely cleaned a small bird skeleton and are currently working on a squirrel. In the past, I have boiled the skeletons I have built. It worked well with some but not so well with others. A lot of people do not notice the problems that boiling causes but I can see it. It causes the deterioration of the bones, some yellowing (although peroxide does wonders for that), and makes the bones more brittle. To make this option worse, most family members do not appreciate walking into a room where roadkill is being boiled. I have also tried maceration in the past without much success. In my experience maceration works best in warm weather so it is not a year round way to handle skeletons (plus it smells awful and takes quite a while). Dermestid beetles are great at cleaning skeletons and do no harm to the bones. In theory my colony consists of somewhere around 700-1000 beetles and larvae by now but who's counting. They were able to finish the bird I placed in there in about 4 days. I think the squirrel will take about a week to finish. Surprisingly, so far, there are no horrible odors coming from all of this. The beetles themselves do not stink, it is their food that stinks. To give you an idea of the progress my colony can make in just under 24 hours here are three shots of the same squirrel rib cage.

This one was taken around 6 pm on Friday, 2 days after I placed the squirrel in the aquarium (the white within the ribcage is a paper towel placed within to keep the shape of the ribcage).
This one was taken the next morning around 10 am.This one was taken Saturday around 4:30 pm.The rest of the skeleton is coming along beautifully and I can not wait to start building this skeleton and get my next one started.