How do you clean a hummingbird skeleton? Like this!

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Oak Ridge teacher forms business around flesh-eating beetles, skulls

Hitchcock’s skull-cleaning shop is in Oak Ridge in what used to be a hairdressing salon. He started out with 25 dermestid beetles, and today he has colonies of several thousand.

The beetles are kept inside two 20-by-22-foot floor freezers where the temperature remains about 90 degrees. Once the beetles have done their job, Hitchcock de-greases the skulls with white gasoline and finally whitens them by soaking them in an oxidation agent.

Most of his skulls come from hunters, trappers and taxidermists. On a recent visit to his shop, Hitchcock showed his guests a complete hummingbird skeleton prepared by his biology students. The skull was as thin as an eggshell, and the entire skeleton easily fit in the palm of his hand.

‘‘See that thing that looks like a hair?’’ Hitchcock said. ‘‘That’s the tongue.’’

Hitchcock took out a skunk skull that had been in the floor freezer for a week. The adult beetles crawled through the eye sockets while the larvae flossed between the skunk’s needle-sharp teeth. The beetles also were chomping on skulls belonging to chipmunks, squirrels and whitetailed deer.

Hitchcock said cleaning skulls gives him rare insight into mammal anatomy.

‘‘To me it’s fun, almost a Zen thing,’’ he said. '‘You learn how everything connects, right down to the bare essentials of bone and tissue.’