How to access a preexisting collection with Mongoose?

I have a large collection of 300 question objects in a database test. I can interact with this collection easily through MongoDB's interactive shell; however, when I try to get the collection through Mongoose in an express.js application I get an empty array.

My question is, how can I access this already existing dataset instead of recreating it in express? Here's some code:

var mongoose = require('mongoose');
var Schema = mongoose.Schema;

mongoose.connect('mongodb://localhost/test');
mongoose.model('question', new Schema({ url: String, text: String, id: Number }));

var questions = mongoose.model('question');
questions.find({}, function(err, data) { console.log(err, data, data.length); });

This outputs:

null [] 0