A Field Guide to the North Side of Old Mill Hill, Atlantic Mine, MI
Archive for the ‘Coleoptera’ Category.
One of the feral apple trees about 100 yards behind the house has very “late” apples, that stay on the tree a loooong time. As in, as of now (mid-December, with a couple of feet of snow on the ground), it still has some apples that were too high for the deer to eat. The apples were actually getting ripe in mid-October, and one of them that I picked to eat had a deep crevice in its surface[1]. Down in the bottom of the crevice was this beetle:
We get these big honking beetles flying around for a brief period in the late spring/early summer. For us, that means early-to-mid June, so people here call them “June Beetles” or “June Bugs”. Further south, they are “May Beetles”. Last June, this one evidently smacked into the window in our back door overnight and stunned itself[4], which would be why I found it laying on the ground there in the morning.
This little beetle was found out back, crawling around in my father-in-law’s hunting blind[1].
This one looks like a battle-scarred old veteran. I found it near the road, so it is possible that it lost its antenna and fractured a wing cover in an encounter with a passing vehicle[1], not in combat with some predator or prey:
I was picking up apples in the side yard[1], and found this grub burrowing into one.
These are commonly referred to as “wireworms”. Unlike most other insect grubs, they have a hard exoskeleton that makes them remarkably durable. They are hard to crush, hard to pull apart, and all in all have about the consistency of a piece of wire. They do have legs, which you can see above, but they barely use them and for the most part their behavior is quite wormlike.
I’m sure everybody has seen these:
This is obviously a larder beetle, Dermestes lardarius. It is a little fellow, only about half a centimeter long or so. They get into decomposing garbage, stored foods with bad seals, and similar things[1]. Since they find our garbage so appealing, they have been carried by us pretty much around the world.
A few weeks ago, I posted pictures of a predatory beetle, and mentioned that I’d like to get a picture of the larva of that beetle, because they were pretty wicked-looking[1]. Well, here’s a nice example, which I found crawling across the kitchen floor[2]. Correction: this is evidently some type of carrion beetle (see comment from “Anthony” below). The small squares on the grid are 1 mm, so this larva is close to 2 cm long.
Continue reading ‘Carrion(?) beetle larva, unidentified eggs’ »
Aaahh! Zombie Mouse!
OK, so on Wednesday, June 13[1], there was some stuff I had to haul out of the basement. The basement has one of those outdoor cellar entrances, with a slanting hatchway covering a set of concrete steps leading down. Since this was the best way to haul out bulky things, I opened up the lid . . . and saw . . . a dead mouse laying on the stairs [2]. Ok, kind of nasty, but not too bad, except . . . then . . . it started to move. Not just a little motion, it hopped up, rolled over, and fell down to the next step! Gah!
And then, the cause became obvious. These two large [3] beetles disengaged themselves from the corpse and scurried off.
My, Grandma, what big mandibles you have!
This one I did *not* find in the house![1] It was out front, crossing the road[2]. It was strong and fast, and I had to hold onto it pretty firmly to get that face shot.
This week’s arthropod is a lady beetle, most likely a Multicolored Asian Lady Beetle, Harmonia axyridis. When these first started getting into the house, we thought that we were being invaded by a dozen different species, because they vary in their shade of orange and in the number of spots. It turns out it is just an extremely variable species, though.
