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Sticker of Garden chafer
Bug card No. 0552 of 1,500

Garden chafer

Phyllopertha horticola
Eats: PlantsBeetlesGardens and meadows6 legs

The garden chafer is a small beetle with a shiny green head and brown, fuzzy wing cases. Its feelers end in a tiny fan that it uses to smell. In early summer you can see lots of them buzzing around bushes and gardens.

Lives in
Europe and Asia, as far as Siberia and Mongolia, in meadows, hedges, parks and gardens
Length
0.8 to 1.1 cm (0.33 to 0.43 in)
Top speed
about 0.43 km/h (0.27 mph)
On foot, estimate
Can it hurt you?
Harmless
Harmless. It cannot sting or hurt you, though gardeners do not like it eating their plants.
What does it eat?
The beetles nibble leaves, flowers and young fruit of trees and shrubs, like oak, hazel, birch, cherry and roses. The grubs underground eat grass roots.
For real!Photo of Garden chafer
Picture by Charles J. Sharp. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How big is it?

How long is it?

Garden chafer about 1.1 cm long (0.43 in)A grain of rice about 6 mm (0.24 in)A toy building brick about 3.2 cm (1.3 in)
as long as 2 grains of rice in a rowcould run across a dinner table in 8.4 seconds

How big is Garden chafer compared to YOU?

Just maths in your browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.

How fast is it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

1

Its feelers end in a fan of three little plates, which it can spread out to catch smells.

2

In June so many of them come out at once that they swarm around the bushes.

3

Its grub lives in the soil for two or three years before it becomes a beetle.

4

A grown-up beetle only lives for up to eight weeks.

5

The mother beetle lays her eggs in the ground, about as deep as your hand is long.

you asked

Most asked questions about Garden chafer

?Is the garden chafer harmful?

Not to people. It can damage leaves, flowers and lawns, so gardeners see it as a pest.

?What does a garden chafer eat?

The beetles eat leaves and flowers, and the grubs eat roots of grass and crops.

?How big is a garden chafer?

It is about 1 centimetre long, from 8,5 to 11 millimetres.

For bug experts

Scientific name
Phyllopertha horticola
Named by
Linnaeus, 1758
Group
Beetles
Family
Scarabaeidae
Classification
Insecta > Coleoptera > Scarabaeidae
Lives on
Europe, Asia
Also known as
Garden foliage beetle

Where the facts come from

  1. Phyllopertha horticola (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
  2. Picture by Charles J. Sharp. CC BY-SA 4.0, 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.

More from the same group: Beetles

Also at home here: Gardens and meadows