European chafer
The European chafer is a light reddish brown beetle with grooves along its wing cases. Its babies are fat white C-shaped grubs that live under the lawn. On warm summer nights the grown-up beetles fly out in big swarms.
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Fun facts
A grown-up beetle lives only one or two weeks. Most of its life it is a grub in the ground.
The beetles come out at about half past eight in the evening, swarm in the trees all night and go back into the soil by morning.
Crows, skunks and raccoons love to eat the grubs, and dig up whole lawns to find them.
A mother beetle lays her eggs one at a time in moist soil, a few centimetres deep.
In winter the grubs dig deeper into the soil to stay away from the frost.
Most asked questions about European chafer
?What do European chafer grubs eat?
They eat the roots of grass, which can make lawns turn brown.
?Is the European chafer harmful?
Not to people. It cannot bite or sting, but its grubs can spoil lawns.
?How big is a European chafer?
The grown-up beetle is about 1.3 to 1.4 centimetres long.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Amphimallon majale
- Group
- Beetles
- Family
- Scarabaeidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Coleoptera > Scarabaeidae
- Lives on
- Europe, North America
Where the facts come from
- European chafer (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Mike Reding & Betsy Anderson, USDA Agricultural Research Service. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at hello@bugwiki.app and we will fix it.
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