How did I come by my beetles

 I was born in 1951 and I have collected beetles since I was fifteen. I was lucky as this hobby of mine was encouraged by a number of brilliant entomologists. Especially three of them deserve to be mentioned: Mr Pavlu from Kraliky and Mr Marek Oldrich from Zamberk, who alas are no longer with us. The third one is Mr Karel Polacek. To him I keep going for advice as well as for experience. At high school, I was fortunate in having a great professor, who helped me to go through the difficult period of puberty so that I started to pursue my interest with even more vigour. Then, at the Agricultural University, in the second year of mu studies, I started working as a science assistant at the department of etymology. At the beginning, I devoted myself to the Ipidae family but I did not like the fact that I had almost nobody with whom I could chat about related problems at various get-togethers. And so I gradually shifted to the group to which I still devote myself – that is the whole superfamily of Scarabaeoidea, in the broader sense, and the family of Scarabaeidae which in particular became the core of my interest. I try to understand it so that I can identify at least a part of the material which ends up on my desk. Of course, I collect also other beetles from the families of Buprestidae, Cerambycidae, Cleridae, Histeridae, Chrysomelidae. And, naturally, I have not lost all my love for the bark beetles (Ipidae) either.