So I've got a few crafty friends who expressed interest in buying rabbit bones and skulls along with the pelts I offered. I've never tried to clean bones myself but have heard the best ways involve dermestid beetles. I have no idea where I'd get those in the middle of nowhere NorCal. I have also heard one person use mealworms instead (like what you feed lizards) and wondered if anyone had tried that? I have a colony of mealworms and dubia roaches for my bearded dragon but I'm positive the dubias would not work since they only eat fruit. Are there any good methods of cleaning rabbit bones without bugs? I'd imagine cooking them would ruin the bones for art purposes.
I don't know what type of art your friends do, but I never had gentle boiling to clean the bones, ruin bones or skulls that I could see.
I prepared hundreds of skins, skulls and bones for museum purposes (wildlife/natural history museums). I skinned the bird or mammal, cut the tissue off the bones, and then boiled the bones on low heat and just long enough to loosen the tissue. Boiling bones might not be good if DNA collection was desired in the future, but the bones themselves looked fine when treated gently. With smaller, more fragile bones, especially those from birds or extremely small mammals like mice and shrews, I did have to be particularly careful not to boil too long or hard.
For skulls, I used a small pot and picked through the debris that came off the skulls/jaws to make sure I didn't lose teeth. I tried to clean the brain case as thoroughly as possible before boiling, and sometimes used a water pick to clean that and the small sinuses in the skull after boiling. I usually left the extremely delicate labyrinth of bones inside the nasal cavity alone, or just gently rinsed that area, since it's easy to break those features. On the other hand, they can harbor small amounts of tissue that might smell bad at least for a while, so depending on the intended use of the skull, sometimes I just cleaned it all out, and most people won't even know it's gone. You could ask your friends what they prefer (if you want to deal with that tediousness at all).
Here are two skulls (coyote and badger) with most of the bones in the nasal cavity left intact:
Speaking of teeth, they could definitely be damaged by boiling too high or long. After boiling and drying, I usually painted the teeth with watered-down white glue, to seal them, and keep them from cracking later due to humidity changes. Sometimes I glued the teeth back into the skull/jaws because they'll fall out, and it can be hard to know in which socket they belong; other times I left them loose for educational purposes.
To get the skulls and bones white, sometimes I used a bleach solution. For the museum I usually skipped this, since too strong a solution, or too long time soaking, can etch or even dissolve the bones. If I wanted the bones white but didn't want to use bleach, I left the bones out in the sun. In that case I put them somewhere the birds (crows, magpies etc) couldn't get at them. The added benefit to this was that sometimes ants found them (I did much of my work in central CA), and ants are
awesome carcass cleaners! In fact if you have a yard with an anthill, put the bones/skull in a little cage (to prevent ants from carrying smaller bones away) and let them do the job!
The nice thing (depending on your intended use) about ants and many other insects is that they generally leave the connective tissue alone, so things stay attached. When you boil, you'll have to glue the two lower jawbones back together, and glue the teeth back in.
Below is a young (fryer age) rabbit skull that has been boiled, but not picked/brushed clean after boiling. To finish this skull, I'd soak it in water until the tissue (the darker parts, sorry I can't get a more detailed photo) is soft, and then use a toothbrush and tweezers to clean the darkened tissue off the bone. (It probably won't look as nice as a skull cleaned immediately after boiling, since there will most likely be stains on the bone where the tissue dried on). You can see that the soft tissue at the nostrils remained and would have to be pulled off. This skull has no smell at all, but it's been sitting for several years. It's better, of course, to clean everything at once when it's all moist and soft. At the stage shown below, I'd expect quite a lot of the fragile bone inside the nasal cavity would come with the tissue when I pulled it off:
Do be aware that cleaning skulls is a pretty time- and labor-intensive process if you do it right, and not everyone finds it very pleasant (especially getting the brain case clean), so it may or may not be worth your time. And skulls don't smell as nice as boiling bones, which smell like soup.
