Spruce beetle
The spruce beetle is a small, dark beetle that lives under the bark of spruce trees. It digs long tunnels in the soft wood just under the bark and lays its eggs there. When there are very many of them, they can harm whole forests.
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Fun facts
It loves fallen trees, cut logs and stumps, and flies to them to start a new family.
Each tunnel can hold about 100 eggs, and the eggs hatch after three to four weeks.
It usually takes two years to grow up. In warm places it takes only one year, and in cold mountains three.
In winter the grown-ups huddle together in groups under the bark.
In Alaska it damaged a huge area of spruce forest in the 1990s, about 30 million trees a year at its worst.
Most asked questions about Spruce beetle
?How big is a spruce beetle?
Only about 4 to 7 millimetres long, smaller than a grain of rice.
?Why are spruce beetles a problem?
When there are lots of them, their tunnels under the bark can kill big spruce trees.
?Is the spruce beetle dangerous?
Not to people. It does not bite or sting.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Dendroctonus rufipennis
- Group
- Beetles
- Family
- Curculionidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Coleoptera > Curculionidae
- Lives on
- North America
- Also known as
- Great spruce bark beetle
Where the facts come from
- Dendroctonus rufipennis (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 Javier E. Mercado. CC BY 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.
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