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Sticker of Variegated June beetle
Bug card No. 4555 of 4,939

Variegated June beetle

Polyphylla variolosa
Eats: PlantsBeetlesGardens and meadows6 legs

The variegated June beetle is a chunky reddish-brown scarab beetle, a bit longer than your thumbnail is wide. At the tip of each feeler it has a little fan of flat plates. It likes sandy ground near big lakes and the sea.

Lives in
North America, on sandy ground near the Great Lakes and the east coast
Length
2 cm (0.79 in)
Top speed
about 0.58 km/h (0.36 mph)
On foot, estimate
Can it hurt you?
Harmless
Harmless. It has no sting and does not bite people.
What does it eat?
Like other June beetles, it eats plants. Its fat white grubs live in the soil and nibble on roots.
For real!Photo of Variegated June beetle
Picture by Henrique Pacheco. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How big is it?

How long is it?

Variegated June beetle about 2 cm long (0.79 in)A grain of rice about 6 mm (0.24 in)A toy building brick about 3.2 cm (1.3 in)A crayon about 9 cm (3.5 in)
as long as 3 grains of rice in a rowcould run across a dinner table in 6.2 seconds

How big is Variegated June beetle compared to YOU?

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How fast is it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

1

The fans on its feelers are made of seven thin plates that it can spread out.

2

Boys have much longer feeler fans than girls, so you can tell them apart.

3

It lives from Quebec in Canada all the way south to Virginia in the United States.

you asked

Most asked questions about Variegated June beetle

?How big is the variegated June beetle?

It is a little over 2 centimetres long.

?Where does the variegated June beetle live?

In North America, on sandy soil near the Great Lakes and along the coast from Quebec to Virginia.

For bug experts

Scientific name
Polyphylla variolosa
Group
Beetles
Family
Scarabaeidae
Classification
Insecta > Coleoptera > Scarabaeidae
Lives on
North America

Where the facts come from

  1. Polyphylla variolosa (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 Henrique Pacheco. CC0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this 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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More from the same group: Beetles

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