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The compensation, however, is ample, in the form of Manop Rattanarithikul, the owner and curator, who is indeed very much alive at age 76, brimming with all the knowledge and inquisitiveness of the scientist he remains.

A visit to his twostorey cabinet of curiosities on Nimmanhemin Soi 13 is worthwhile regardless, but talking to Manop makes it very special indeed.

So he's a bug man? No, he's not an entymologist, although his wife Rampa certainly is - she's still dashing about the globe gathering the buzz on mosquitoes, which are her speciality. In fact she's one of only five people in the world with a level of mosquito expertise good enough for the Smithsonian Institution, her longtime employer.

It was mosquitoes - purveyors of fine itches and much worse - that brought Rampa and Manop together. She's the expert on them, and he's the expert on the "much worse", meaning malaria.

Together they spent five decades stalking an insect that stalks people, which seems vengeful, but there's far more to it than that.

For one thing, Manop introduced to science 18 new species of mosquitoes native to Thailand, in the interest of finding out what they do and why they do it. He and Rampa have filled what must be a cavern at the Smithsonian with specimens from here and other countries.

If you come across a mosquito calling itself Toxorhynchites manopi, you can say you read about its namesake, the man who discovered it in 1959.

Close enough to 60 years ago the World Health Organisation dispatched to Thailand Drs Deed and Ernestine Thurman of the US Public Health Service, another husbandandwife team, to do something about the malaria problem here.

The Thurmans needed help catching and studying the perpetrators, and young Manop had good English, a collector's enthusiasm dating back to childhood (see the "vulture's egg stone", his first find) - and excellent blood.

He reckons he's been sampled by more than 400 different types of mosquitoes over the years, which has to be pretty much all of the species in Thailand. In return he's been able to decide which ones are nice and which ones are naughty.

Paid a handsome wage of Bt12 a day to begin with, he roamed the land finding out which mosquitoes lived where, with particular attention to the malaria zones.

With a glass siphon that could match the insects' sucking ability, he gathered hundreds of specimens per outing. The ones caught live with a bribe of plasma soon laid eggs, from which another generation was cultivated.

He matched up fresh males and females to get them breeding, but captive mosquitoes tend to be shy, so Manop would have to pluck the hairs off the male's thorax and place its little insect willy against the female's reproductive organ. Then she was sent to her room with a portion of blood and hopefully with child.

Manop did more survey work for the US Operation Mission to Thailand, running inspections for malaria and filariasis. All the trekking up mountains and through swamps has turned out an enviably spry septuagenarian. In 1965 he got some desk time as the mosquito tax¬onomist at the Smithsonian in Washington.

Then it was back to Thailand, up and down more mountains. The end result is just coming out, an immense book that he and Rampa have amassed about the local mosquitoes.

Several manuscript volumes hang from the door of the museum office in case anyone wants a preview of what it not likely to be a bestseller, but is certainly the definitive study on the subject.

Of the thousands of kinds of mosquitoes, it turns out, only 44 are known to carry deadly diseases like malaria, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis and filariasis.

The rest are not only safe, they're helpful. It's a fact that ought to shut up people who wonder why the mosquito exists at all, but we always tend to focus on the bad apples.

The bug's benefit is in toughening up the immune systems of humans and other animals that get bitten, which is a small price to pay for a bit of itching and scratching.

"Through this mosquitotohuman process, humans are naturally vaccinated. The mosquito is a valuable creature!" Manop insists, with a tolerance born of a deeply spiritual perspective. The museum is as much devoted to the divine as it is to insects. God is, in effect, the preeminent natural wonder there.

The few spots in his intricate amusement park that don't sport beetles and other strange artefacts are covered with paintings, which he says he's done himself, although there's another bloke on the premises wielding a brush.

Like the bits of prose and poetry also posted here and there, these are almost all uplifting, beaming with naturenurture trust in the planet. I especially liked the one about the dust belonging to the furniture.

Manop's proselytising is decidedly bugcentric, however. He rails against human efforts to overcome nature's inconveniences with, for example, generous lashings of DDT. Helpful insect species are the collateral damage in this chemical carpetbombing.

A big part of his job for the international health and aid agencies involved guiding the DDT missiles with a little more precision.

With malaria still a serious publichealth threat in Asia, home to a third of the world's 400 million cases reported annually, it takes some doing not to wince at the footlong model of a mosquito that Manop and Rampa always seem to be cuddling in press photos.

Still, Manop's predilection for using the word "beautiful" when he talks about mosquitoes is easier to swallow when you see some of the truly horrific other bugs in his display cases.

With 4,668 species accounted for, there's no exhibition room left.

Whatever space is not occupied by mosquitoes, termites, ants, beetles, spiders, butterflies, centipedes, scorpions, walking sticks and inspirational paintings is fully consumed by eggs, teeth, seashells, gemstones, petrified wood, dinosaur bones, impossibly large hornets' nests and lots of rock and wood carved or moulded by humans or nature into the shape of something entirely different, including the "beautiful part of the woman and man".

Go get bugged …

The museum is at 17 Nimmanhenda Road Soi 13 and open daily from 8 to 5. Admission is Bt300, plus Bt100 if you want to take pictures, and it's wellused income. Call (053) 211 891 or email insectmuseum@hotmail.com.