Garden chafer
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.
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Fun facts
Its feelers end in a fan of three little plates, which it can spread out to catch smells.
In June so many of them come out at once that they swarm around the bushes.
Its grub lives in the soil for two or three years before it becomes a beetle.
A grown-up beetle only lives for up to eight weeks.
The mother beetle lays her eggs in the ground, about as deep as your hand is long.
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
- 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.
- Picture by Charles J. Sharp. CC BY-SA 4.0, 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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