Ollie Greer collects things. Music, films, electric trains, insects — name a subject, childhood toy or arthropod, and Greer probably has collected it.

By way of metaphor, the tall, balding 44-year-old pointed to his tie Saturday to explain his passion for things. Adorned with images of the Borg, the menacing, half-cyborg, half-human baddies from Star Trek, the tie is a head-turner, something you're more likely to see at the annual Comic-Con in San Diego than, say, at the Santa Fe Children's Museum.

"Resistance to interesting things is futile," Greer said, smiling, bending the Borg's most famous utterance to communicate his need to collect.

The Santa Fe Children's Museum, which has reopened after being closed for three weeks, showcases Greer's collection of insects, Metamorphosis, a result of his 34-year-old quest to understand the insect world after he found a dead wasp one day when he was 10 in Northern California.

Curious, Greer said he thumbed through an insect encyclopedia until he found the entry for the wasp. "I want the rest of this book," Greer recalled saying to himself as a boy.

Greer has done his best to accomplish that goal over the intervening decades. He still owns the book, which is a shambles of a text, with its broken spine and pages falling out. But there he was thumbing through it again Saturday, three decades after the amateur entomology bug bit him, pointing out different insects among the 2,300 beetles, spiders, stick insects, cicadas, butterflies, millipedes, bees and ants — and numerous other species too long to list in this story — hanging on the walls of the Santa Fe Children's Museum.

"I have 4,500 more at home," Greer said.

Greer's collection takes up a minimum of space in the newly remodeled museum, which has doubled in size thanks to recent renovations. A room has been added at the back of the museum for birthday parties and classes, while another new area will be used by artists who team up with children on projects, said Anna Marie Tutera Manriquez, the museum's director.

Manriquez spoke over the din of screaming, squealing, laughing children who scampered to and fro to check out the museum's offerings. Greer's collection was definitely one of the draws.

"The irony is that I've been arachnophobic since I was a child," Greer was saying to two young girls who looked up in wonderment — or perhaps fright — at dozens of dead spiders, some larger than a man's hand. The arachnids were safely behind glass, pinned to Styrofoam.

"Do they live in Santa Fe?" Mina Radfarr, 9, asked Greer, pointing to a particularly large, frightening specimen.

No, responded Greer.

"Good," she said.

When Manriquez became the museum's director late last year, one of its founders told her about Greer's collection.

"I thought it was just extraordinary," Manriquez said. "I thought, 'We have to have it back and have it back at the opening.' "

Ultimately, the museum hopes to become a permanent home for Greer's collection. "We're working toward that," Manriquez said.

Elisabeth Keller, the museum's education director, said Saturday that she envisions teaming up with Greer to impart his love of entomology to children and adults alike.

Insects are just one of Greer's many interests. In fact, he is as apt to drop the name of legendary jazz drummer Buddy Rich into a conversation as he is to talk about books, or Star Wars, or Star Trek, or world music, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

He admits to having a certain sense of wonder, which he says fuels his need to collect — and to share his passion with anyone willing to listen.

Greer was discussing his passion with Nizhoni Redmond's father as the 13-year-old snapped photos of some of his butterflies.

"The butterflies are my favorite," Nizhoni Redmond said. "Beautiful colors. My mother loves butterflies too."

As for the spiders, scorpions, cockroaches, millipedes and centipedes that hung in a large glass case across the room, she had a decidedly different reaction.

"They're a little bit creepy, but they're dead so they can't do anything now."

Contact Trip Jennings at 986-3050 or at tjennings@sfnewmexican.com.