Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) saw nobility in the fragile remains in amber, 

"The Spider, Flye, and Ant, being tender dissipable substances, falling into Amber, are therein buryed, finding theirin both a Death and Tombe, preserving them better from Corruption than a Royal Monument."

Before the Saskatchewan River can disgorge into Lake Winnipeg in central Manitoba, it has to enter Cedar Lake. This lake acts as a giant settling pond where lumps of amber, coal fragments and shells accumulate at the mouth of the river. The amber is not local; it came from a thousand kilometres away, from the valleys of the Red Deer and South Saskatchewan rivers where low-grade coal deposits with amber nodules of Late Cretaceous age are exposed widely.

In 1934 Thomas Walker, a mineralogist from the Royal Ontario Museum, noted the presence of insects and spiders in Cedar Lake amber. At that time, no diverse insect fauna was known from Cretaceous amber, so it was not surprising that Frank Carpenter, the Curator of Fossil Insects at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, asked to borrow this insect-bearing amber. Walker dispatched 87 amber insects and, in 1937 when Carpenter and six specialists published formal descriptions, they recognized no fewer than 23 new species, seven new genera and two new families in this small collection. This fauna was, at the time, the most diverse insect fauna known from the Cretaceous of North America.

Among the specialists describing the Cedar Lake insects and arachnids was Professor Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University who focussed on the taxonomy of living and fossil gall wasps before he began working exclusively on human sexuality which culminated in publication of Sexual Behavior of the Human Male and Female in 1948 and 1953. The gall wasp from Cedar Lake amber proved to be the oldest and most primitive member of the gall wasp family Cynipidae.

The most comprehensive assessment of Cedar Lake amber and its fossils was provided by two entomologists from Agriculture Canada in 1969. J. McAlpine and J. Martin reviewed all previous work on the deposit and examined all available collections in order to assemble the best estimate possible of diversity and abundance. They tallied an astonishing 70 families of insects, 12 families of spiders, plus a tardigrade (so-called "water bear"), crustacean and amoeboid. This variety of animals means that the central Manitoba amber deposit is among the most diverse Cretaceous amber localities anywhere in the world. But it is not particularly abundant -- only one piece of amber in fifty contains a fossil.

Further reading:

McAlpine, J.F. and Martin, J.E.H.
1969:  Canadian amber -- a paleontological treasure chest. Canadian Entomologist, vol. 101, p. 819-838.