Monday, July 09, 2012

Shiny, happy beetle

I discovered this little chap (or chapess – not sure how you tell? Or how the beetles tell, come to that – presumably they can) on our lavender this week.

Isn’t he lovely? A beautiful metallic brown with green, bejewelled stripes. A blinged-up beetle.

IMG_0448 

The rosemary beetle has a taste, it seems, for all manner of aromatic plants. Much as I love to see the bees on the lavender, I think there’ll be enough flowers to go around, even with a few of these chewing the buds. I might resort to a bit of hand squishing if they start to get out of hand. After a chat on Twitter, I thought that they might make an interesting aromatic popcorn-style snack if cooked in a hot pan. Arabella Sock had the altogether more tasteful suggestion of turning them into earrings.

Any other ideas for such a pretty pest?

3 comments:

Woolly Green said...

What a fabulous blinged up beetle!! It looks a little bit like North Queensland's christmas beetles. Great (I am told) as christmas tree decorations - although I can't vouch for this!!

Minnie Moore said...

The beetle certainly looks accessories-worthy. If they don't stop munching on the plants, I totally understand why you would want to squish those beetles. If I have plants on my own, I might do the same thing too.

Nutty Gnome said...

They are gorgeous - no matter how many plants they much...although Arabella Sock may be onto something with the earrings idea......