The Insect Rearing Group and the Development of Insect Rearing as a Profession
W. A. Dickerson, Norman C. Leppla
Abstract
Insect rearing has been a part of human history for more than 5,000 years, if beekeeping and silk production are taken into account. The ancient Egyptians commonly cultured honeybees for food and embalming materials, Marco Polo, describing his trip to China in 1255 A.D., stated that "no fewer than a thousand carriages and packhorses, loaded with silk, make their way daily into Peking." Except for these two examples, however, insect rearing was essentially a static art from 3000 B.C. until 1900 A.D. Papers on rearing Drosophila sp. began to appear in the early 1900s as a consequence of genetic studies. Nutritional and rearing studies of the European corn borer and pink bollworm followed in the 1940s. Beginning in the mid 1950s, insect rearing proliferated, perhaps inspired by publication of the first successful artificial diet for a phytophagous insect by Stanley D. Beck et al. (1949).