Noble chafer
The noble chafer is a beautiful metallic green beetle with little white specks. In the sun it shimmers gold, copper or even violet. It spends most of its life as a fat grub hidden inside old rotting trees.
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Fun facts
Its grub grows up to almost 5 centimetres long, much bigger than the beetle itself.
The grub lives in rotting wood of old oaks, willows, poplars and fruit trees for two years.
In Britain it is very rare now and lives mostly in a few old fruit orchards.
You can see the grown-up beetles from May to August, mostly on warm, sunny days.
It loves big flat flower heads like hogweed.
Most asked questions about Noble chafer
?Is the noble chafer rare?
Yes, in many places. It is getting rarer because old trees with rotting wood are disappearing.
?What does the noble chafer eat?
Grown-ups eat nectar and pollen from flowers. The grubs eat rotting wood.
?How big is a noble chafer?
It is about 1.5 to 1.9 centimetres long.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Gnorimus nobilis
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1758
- Group
- Beetles
- Family
- Scarabaeidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Coleoptera > Scarabaeidae
- Lives on
- Europe
Where the facts come from
- Noble chafer (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 Siga. CC BY-SA 3.0, 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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