AS a schoolboy obsessed with birds and butterflies, I never found the time or inspiration to investigate the third b—the beetles—until I came face to jaws with my first male stag beetle. I still recall what impressed me most. It wasn’t the size, although this formidable beetle was as big as a matchbox, nor the fierce antlers, but the fact that this extraordinary creature could fly, which it promptly did as soon as I got down to investigate it.
Suddenly, it flipped its front wings (its elytra) forward, revealing its improbable hind wings. They whirred into action and the beetle was off—a clumsier flying machine it was impossible to imagine.
In those distant days, it took a visit to the library to find out more. Lucanus cervus was, I discovered, the biggest of the 4,000 or so beetles to be found in these islands. Its lifecycle was as unlikely as the beetle itself, as the larva spends five or six years munching and boring its way through dead wood.
Hardly the most nutritious of food, so it’s no wonder the larva takes so long to mature. When it finally emerges as an adult, it has only a few weeks to mate and start the whole cycle again.
The ability to fly is something that most of the world’s beetles are capable of, although few spend much time in the air. Most are ground-dwellers, their adult lives spent rummaging around in stones or leaf litter. Others, presumably those that are good on the wing, are attracted to flowers: beetles are thought to be the original pollinators, first visiting flowers when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. According to one source, beetles are responsible for pollinating 88% of the 240,000 species of flowering plants around the world, a remarkable statistic.
Denne historien er fra October 30, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra October 30, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
