Huge grub becomes big beetle
Somehow in the rush of
early June, I seem to have forgotten to post about the world's largest
grub, found by Bradley in the horse
manure as he
shoveled the biomass into buckets to be transported to our worm
bin. While I
do exaggerate slightly, the grub Bradley found was significantly larger
than a June bug larva, and we took the time to toss it in a flower pot
in hopes of learning what the plump youngster would turn into.
Saturday,
I decided to find out whether there was any life left in my fig cuttings,
so I dumped out the contents of that pot. And broke open a
fist-sized ball of dirt that housed a pupating beetle! The insect
was even larger than it had appeared on last viewing, so I carefully
fit its pupal chamber back together and refilled the pot, hoping the
tween will manage to make it to adulthood despite my poking and
prodding.
Mark's original idea
after seeing the size of the grub was to raise the species for chicken
feed, but I suspect the experiment wouldn't really work out. Stag
beetles usually spend several years in the larval stage, which would
make propagating them a slow affair, despite the amount of nutrition
each beetle would provide for our flock.
All utilitarian reasons
aside, we're itching to see the adult version of this hefty
critter. I suspect the stag beetle it turns into will be
awe-inspiring.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Marco --- We had a stump with grubs too. We figured ours were horned passalus, which is related to stag beetles. They made some great compost!