Beetles

The White-Spotted Sawyer Beetles are not favorites of the lumber industry because their wood-boring habits decrease usable wood, stain it, and open the door for decomposers. Hermit Flower Beetles are found around the edges of woodlands. Like the WSS, the HFB’s larvae are found in the wood of dead trees—the eggs are laid in damp, rotting wood and within that wood the large, whitish larvae feed for three years. WSSs and HFBs are found from coast to coast across the northern half of North America.

Crawling Water Beetles live in ponds and lake edges and can be found scrambling through the water column or feeding in mats of aquatic plants, especially algae. Where there is a current, look for them in crevices between rocks.

The Soft-winged Flower Beetle are often found on flowers out in the open, where they eat pollen, insect eggs, and flower-loving insects that land within their grasp. The larvae generally stay concealed under tree bark or leaf litter or soil, where they prey on other invertebrates. North America accounts for 500-plus species of often-strikingly-colored, slightly-hairy beetles.

Ladybugs are not bugs in the Order Hemiptera. A more appropriate name is lady beetle or ladybird beetle. It seems that back in the Middle Ages, the European grape crop was threatened by a horde of aphids. Adult ladybugs eat aphids, and larval ladybugs eat aphids, and lady beetles rode to the rescue. A female may lay as many as 1,000 eggs over a few weeks, usually near aphid herds. Some of the eggs are fertile and some are not. If aphids are scarce, the sterile eggs serve as food for the larvae.

Adult Flatheaded Poplar Borer Beetles are found by day on pine and aspen trees. Eggs are laid on the twigs or bark of dead or dying Bigtooth Aspen, and the larvae chew zigzag trails just under the bark, eating the protein and sugar of the sapwood for two to five years or (anecdotally) decades. They pupate under the bark and chew their way out after emerging as adults.

Today’s two beetles are biters. There’s oodles of information about one of them, the sap beetle because its path intersects with ours regularly; the other is one of a legion of anonymous, gray, long-horned beetles.