The skull cleaners: The flesh-eating beetle business is booming in Alaska

WASILLA — Before he had millions of flesh-eating beetles, Ron Sheldon’s taste in insects was more conventional.

“I’ve always been a bee person. I grew up with bees,” said Sheldon, a native of northern California.

He stood in his workshop, midway through removing superfluous toe bones from a black bear hide atop his fleshing table.

“This actually started by accident,” Sheldon said with nod toward the room, filled with animal heads and horns.

Sheldon uses beetles to strip flesh from skulls as part of his taxidermy and bone-cleaning business. Alaska has a rich tradition of taxidermy, and in the last several years the use of insects to aid the process has become a bigger part of it.

“They’re an awesome little critter,” said Sheldon, who runs his business, Graybeard’s Beetles, out of two outbuildings and a garage at his home in Wasilla. “I’ll knock out a bear skull in a week ... moose take a little longer.”

His services are in high demand. Last spring, Sheldon’s beetles cleaned 287 bear skulls. By the end of this hunting season, his work spaces were cluttered with heads: moose, caribou, Dall sheep, mountain goats, beaver, marten, musk ox and a walrus, all in various states of decomposition and decoration.

Sheldon started Graybeard’s in 2020, after a 26-year career in the military. At first, it was just a hobby to complement his hunting and trapping as he worked at a state hatchery. But within a few years, as his name got around, growth was “exponential.” He estimates by year’s end he’ll have handled 800-900 projects for customers, mostly skull cleaning, but a good deal of trophy mounting and other taxidermy, too.

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In the summer of 2023, he quit his hatchery job to do Graybeard’s Beetles full-time.

“If you don’t sleep, there’s 168 hours in a week,” Sheldon said.

Word spreads

Dermestidae is the umbrella term for beetles that eat organic material like flesh and skin, breaking down dead meat in nature. The subset of taxidermists keeping dermestid beetle colonies harness those natural abilities for commercial and aesthetic ends.

“The larvae actually consume more of the material than the adults,” said Heidi Hatcher, a biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Glennallen. “The very small ones can get into the smallest nooks and crannies.”

Hatcher was first exposed to beetles in college, but didn’t establish a colony until she started her job with Fish and Game and was tasked with cleaning a sheep skull for display in a state office.

“My impression, when I first got into it, was that in Alaska specifically there weren’t a lot of people with colonies yet. And more recently, over the last five years or so, more people are popping up,” Hatcher said.

She floated the idea of setting up a colony within the office to handle specimens that came to state game managers, but the response was “tepid.” So she set up a small operation in her home garage.

“Word spreads like wildfire. I’m still regularly … getting people coming to me asking if I still have beetles,” said Hatcher, who has since wound down her colony.

There are other ways to clean a skull. The most low-tech is boiling, but it leaves bones discolored and often warped. Maceration involves soaking material in warm water and letting bacteria eat away everything edible. Beetles are faster than the latter method, and leave specimens in better condition than the former. Even the fine, honeycombed bones within the nasal cavity are left fully intact after the larvae have feasted.

Beetles have long been kept at universities to prepare animal specimens for museum displays, including at the University of Alaska’s Museum of the North. But their use by hobbyist and taxidermy businesses in Alaska is more recent, according to Hatcher.

“It seems mostly to be established taxidermists that are investing in these colonies,” Hatcher said.

Within the craft of taxidermy are lots of subcategories and specialties. Sheldon practices some of the traditional staples, like making rugs from bear hides and creating “shoulder mounts,” where the top of an animal is reassembled so its head and neck poke out from a wall display.

In contrast, there are also “European mounts,” where just the cleaned skull and, when applicable, antlers or horns are left on the trophy. “Euros” have grown more popular in recent years, according to several Alaska taxidermists.

With more demand for skulls has come more demand to clean them with dermestid beetles.

Of course, there are downsides, too. A big one is the smell.

“It’s a little bit of everything,” said Sheldon, hoisting open the lid to a large beetle box with a carpet of pulsating insects beneath moldering bear, moose and rodent skulls. “It’s a certain amount of ammonia from rotting meat. They have a natural earthy funk to them, no matter what. It’s just because of their excrement.”

He built the windowless beetle shack specifically for this purpose. Lining the walls were four repurposed chest freezers, along with a box he fabricated himself that’s the size of a dining room table. It can hold five to seven moose heads with the antlers still attached.

After the beetles have done their job, the skulls are degreased, inspected, whitened, reinspected and sealed before they’re released to customers as finished trophies.

‘The beetle guy in Wasilla’

There are several theories as to why skulls have gotten more popular.

“When COVID hit, we ended up with a thousand bears in a year,” said Russell Knight, owner of Knight’s Taxidermy in Anchorage.

Knight’s explanation for the uptick in demand for taxidermic services during the pandemic is simple.

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“Everybody went hunting,” he said with a shrug. “It took us a long time to dig out of it. And we’re just now really kinda catching up.”

Knight’s is the largest taxidermy business in Alaska, with 15 employees handling everything from local moose mounts to exotic African cats.

Outside the main shop building, Knight pointed across the parking lot to a small red hut.

“That’s the bug room,” he said.

Besides keeping away the smell, the distance ensures no beetles get into rooms with hides, which they could decimate.

Knight went into business more than four decades ago. Though the taxidermy sector has contracted in Alaska, he said demand for services is as big as ever.

“Taxidermy is more chic now. And bones and those kinda things are more accepted,” he said.

“Especially since COVID, our European sales are through the roof,” he added, referring to the skull-only mounts. “Less money, more hunting, more decorating.”

European mounts, he explained, are more economical. They not only cost less money, but they take up far less room on a wall.

Sheldon has come to a similar conclusion. He charges around $750 to clean and mount a moose skull European-style. Fully mounting that same specimen is closer to $2,900.

“Sometimes it just comes down to price,” he said.

As for why skulls have gotten more chic, Sheldon thinks it might be in part because they are a decorative middle ground: natural and stark enough to be admired by both hunters and non-hunters alike.

“Part of it’s aesthetics. That hanging on your wall is less offensive than an animal that’s looking at you,” he said.

Even as the beetle side of his business keeps growing, Sheldon hopes to shift toward more taxidermy work.

“It’s hard getting the word out that you’re not just the beetle guy. I’m fairly well known as ‘the beetle guy in Wasilla.’ That part is no problem,” he said.

It’s still a relatively small community of people, mostly trading knowledge back and forth about what works and learning through trial and error.

“We’ve killed a lot of ‘em, just figuring things out,” he said, staring down into a beetle box. Best, he said, is to not interfere with the insects too much, and just leave them to work eating up the flesh. “It’s almost like bees: You can love ‘em to death.”