Rice weevil
The rice weevil is a tiny brown beetle with a long snout, like a little elephant trunk. If you look closely, you can see four orange-red spots on its back. It lives in stored grain like rice, wheat and corn, and its babies grow up inside single grains.
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Fun facts
The mother chews a tiny hole in a grain, lays one egg inside and seals the hole shut.
The baby grows up hidden inside the grain, so you cannot see it.
A female can lay up to 300 eggs in her life.
Grown-up rice weevils can fly and live for up to two years.
Freezing food for three days gets rid of rice weevils in every stage.
Most asked questions about Rice weevil
?Are rice weevils harmful?
They do not bite or sting people, but they spoil rice, flour and other stored grain.
?How do rice weevils get into rice?
The mother lays her eggs inside single grains, so they can already be in the bag when you buy it.
?How big is a rice weevil?
Only about 3 to 4.6 millimetres long.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Sitophilus oryzae
- Group
- Beetles
- Family
- Curculionidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Coleoptera > Curculionidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia and Oceania
Where the facts come from
- Rice weevil (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 picture taken by Olaf Leillinger. CC BY-SA 2.5, 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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