Bare Bones European Mounting

  We began cleaning skulls for ourselves in 1998 after reading how it was done by means of boiling. We cleaned a lot of skulls this way but we didn’t really know the difference between a really good skull and a mediocre one. The process was long and tedious and in our minds, the measure of success was more about how clean the skull was instead of how white and degreased it was in addition to cleanliness. After several years of boiling anything from rodent skulls to moose skulls and everything in between, we decided to give the Dermestid Beetles a try after a friend got some and used them to clean a couple of skulls then offered them to us. He told us that he was giving them away because of the "Stink." (Stink turned out to be an understatement.) At first we housed our colony in plastic containers in our garage and they cleaned a couple of deer heads in a pretty short amount of time. This allowed us to begin focusing on other aspects of increasing the quality of our European Mounts. On the beetle side of the operation, this is where the troubles began. We had several infestations of maggots and we started breaking off multiple colonies knowing that if one died off for any reason we would still have more. We have dealt with mites, maggots, mold, temperature and humidity issues, escapees and stench that would make a Billy Goat puke. (You really find out who your friends are when you go through this process.)
I am pleased to report that although our business is continually a work in progress, we are now able to maintain multiple large colonies of healthy beetles and our proprietary process affords us the ability to handle multiple large specimens at any one time. We are a relatively new business as we began charging for our services for the first time in 2007 but got our first colony of beetles in 2001. Our focus is on turning out a high quality European mount that reflects meticulous attention to detail. We are continually learning and improving our process and we love to see our customers return and happy.