Discovering the huge variety of insects in your garden, when once you may barely have noticed anything other than the odd 'blue bottle' or 'green bottle' fly, is quite an eye opener. To see the insects of course you have to have a garden full of plants to attract them, that is the secret. I feel very protective of my self made organic wildlife garden, so much so that I couldn't think of anyone else being the keeper of it, while I am on this earth that is and when I am no longer on this earth I despair what might become of it so I'm not going anywhere.
You have made the same mistake we all make when starting out, first we notice the pretty things like butterflies, then along come bees with an almost unbelievable number of species. Then one day you spy something which looks all the world like a bee, it's usually something like Eristalis tenax which confuses us. That is when the road to awareness seems to take hold, you will start to spot more and more strange and interesting bugs and insects right under your nose which you never knew existed. There's so many species of insects it makes the mind boggle, and very few of us have an inkling of what there is to be found.
The possibility of a bug database has been raised. Having been interested in the subject for around 10 years now, and conquered much of what I have found in the way of identification, I know how difficult it is to get a positive ID for so many insects and bugs. There's many more where you are than what we have, and believe me, it's more than enough what we have to identify many of them. Some are easy, many are difficult if not impossible to go further than to genus level. Diptera is a particulary difficult subject, for example we have around 70 species of one genus of fly of which most can't be identified to species level without a 'specimen' and even they you would need an expert who has keys, and who can interpret those keys. When you get a fly which is around 3mm long that is no mean task. Bees, we only have around 270 species, some very rare and most of which I won't come across, but there will be many more where you are, in North America there's around 4,000 species so you can imagine the difficulties.
http://bugguide.net/node/view/...
So, my view is it isn't even worth starting on a bug database as there would be so many people wanting to call e.g. a 'green bottle' one species which is usually Lucilia sericata, where in fact there's several species which are very difficult to separate. I'm afraid credibility would be zero.
