Collection of Agricultural Entomology

Didactic Museum of Entomology

Inside the Didactic Museum there is a nucleus of materials that constituted the Beekeeping Museum: ancient handcrafted equipments, hives and other more recent instruments useful for the breeding of bees, honey extraction and honey treatment.

The Museum is also equipped with educational panels on the main orders of insects, as well as aspects of the biology of individual species, are also exposed entomological thematic boxes and vegetal materials of various origins, that allow you to observe the different types of damage caused by insects.

This structure is mainly a useful support for students, but it is also used for school visits of middle and high schools.

The research areas have mainly involved the study of the main adversities of agricultural crops, mostly Insects and Mites, as well as strategies for the biological and integrated control of these adversities through the use of their natural antagonists.

The approach generally adopted tends to consider the complex of relationships between the three different levels of the food web in the agricultural and forestry ecosystem: plants, phytophagous arthropods, predatory arthropods and living parasitoids at the expense of the phytophagous.

In recent years, also as a result of the opening of the Degree Course in Forestry and Environmental Sciences, numerous researches have been conducted on the arthropod communities and on some phytophagous of Sicilian forests, as well as on the relationships between natural, semi-natural and agricultural environments, in terms of both fauna and entomological populations. In addition, studies have also been conducted on the defense of wooden structures from the attack of insects that feed on wood (xylophagous), as part of the wider problem of restoration of monuments.

From a museological point of view, the current SAF Department houses several collections, both of a mainly didactic nature and of a strictly scientific nature (Beekeeping collection, general collection of entomology, didactic collection on the biological cycles of some key species, specialist collections).