Cellar/Churchyard Beetle

[inwood]

I've recently been finding cellar beetles (Blaps mucronata), about 1-2 a week, around the two fireplaces. They are fairly sizeable blighters and rear up angrily when picked up to be relocated outside.
http://www.kendall-bioresearch.co.uk/beetle6.htm
I've read that they eat grain and dry vegetable matter, of which there's none of, but having recently cleared out all the debris in the attic off the reed ceilings I'm wondering if I've disturbed some beetles which were happily munching on the old thatch/reed (there's still the remains of a thatched roof under the current roof - a lot of which had fallen onto the reed ceilings.

Does anyone know if these beetles (or their pupae) likely to cause any damage in/to the house?

 

[Penners]

Most of the beetles shown on your linked page appear to be named after what they eat.

So the cellar or churchyard beetle.... ? :shock:

 

[shelli]

Hi Inwood

Kendall Bioresearch site is very useful - I have used it loads - but they are hazy on damage caused by cellar and other ground beetles

Cellar beetle aren't really classified as pests - they tend to eat rotten vegetation - but don't know if this extends to rotting wood - you wouldn't want a whole colony of them in your property i suspect

Try emailing the pied piper stuartbennett@the-piedpiper.co.uk
for further advice

Shelli

 

[Matt Green]

Interesting.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0022-474X(73)90019-2

gives them as a pest of stored products because they turned up in surveys of maltings in the east of England. It also give Pentathrum huttoni as a stored product insect. I have some pretty serious doubts about P. huttoni 's ability as a grain pest as it's wood-boring weevil. The same applies to Euophryum rufum another wood-boring weevil which was reported in a timber floored (....) grain store in West Wycombe, Bucks, in the 1940s and has been labelled a stored product pest by sloppy researchers ever since, particularly D.G Halstead:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0022-474X(86)90011-1

Both P. huttoni and E. rufum show a positive attraction to ethanol (and for that matter the other two UK wood-boring weevils: E. confine, and presumably Pseudophloeophagus aeneopiceus- the oak cask borer) it may be that are attracted by some degrading process that producing a volatile chemical? Not a building fabric pest, or a common insect at all. J.W Munro, author of 'Pests of Stored Products':

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pests-Stored-Products-Rentokil-Library/dp/009076790X

part of the Rentokil library, encouraged readers to send these beetles into the insect indentification unit at Rentokil for their reference collection. You have a bit of a rarity, it seems.


Matt
-searches undertaken at http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/- for those that are interested.