Drugstore beetle
The drugstore beetle is a tiny reddish-brown beetle shaped like a little sausage. It sneaks into kitchen cupboards and eats dry food. It got its name because it also eats dried herbs and plant medicines, like the ones once sold in drugstores.
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Fun facts
It carries a tiny friendly fungus inside its body, and the mother passes it on to her babies.
The grown-up beetles chew holes right through food packets.
A mother beetle lays up to 75 eggs in or near food.
A relative of it was found trapped in amber about 90 million years old, from the time of the dinosaurs.
It is the only living kind of beetle in its genus.
Most asked questions about Drugstore beetle
?Is the drugstore beetle harmful?
Not to people. But it gets into dry food like flour, cookies and spices and spoils it.
?How big is a drugstore beetle?
Tiny. It is only 2.5 to 3.5 millimetres long.
?Why is it called the drugstore beetle?
Because it eats dried herbs and plant medicines, like the ones sold in old drugstores.
Myth buster
Myth: It is a weevil, because people sometimes call it the biscuit weevil.
Truth: No. It is not a weevil at all, just a regular beetle without the long weevil snout.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Stegobium paniceum
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1758
- Group
- Beetles
- Family
- Ptinidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Coleoptera > Ptinidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Bread beetle, Biscuit beetle, Biscuit weevil
Where the facts come from
- Drugstore beetle (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 Udo Schmidt from Deutschland. CC BY-SA 2.0, 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 [email protected] and we will fix it.
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