Great spruce bark beetle
The great spruce bark beetle is a small dark brown beetle shaped like a little tube. It digs tunnels under the bark of spruce trees and lays its eggs there. Its white, C-shaped larvae chew their way through the soft layer just under the bark.
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Fun facts
The mother lays a hundred eggs or more in one little room under the bark.
She pushes out sticky tree resin mixed with droppings, which makes a purplish brown blob on the bark.
There are many more females than males, often ten girls for every boy.
It is a weak flyer, so it often just walks or tunnels to another part of the same tree.
It can take five to eight years before a tree it lives in finally dies.
Most asked questions about Great spruce bark beetle
?Is the great spruce bark beetle harmful?
Not to people, but it can kill spruce trees and is a big problem for forests.
?What does the great spruce bark beetle eat?
Its larvae eat the soft layer just under the bark of spruce and other conifer trees.
?How big is the great spruce bark beetle?
Only about 6 to 9 millimetres long.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Dendroctonus micans
- Named by
- Kugelann, 1794
- Group
- Beetles
- Family
- Curculionidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Coleoptera > Curculionidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, North America
Where the facts come from
- Dendroctonus micans (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 Gilles San Martin from Namur, Belgium. 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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