A sunny Saturday was spent exploring the cloughs and moors of the Dark Peak in Derbyshire, on a beetle hunt...
The main target of the day was to try and find Violet Oil Beetle Meloe violaceus, as part of Buglife's Oil Beetle Hunt. And very successful the hunt was too, with three males found during the day, all of them bumbling about in the sunshine, in areas of thin acid grassland on the south-facing slopes of the clough.
As well as being pretty striking looking creatures, oil beetles have a remarkable life cycle. After mating, the females dig a nest tunnel, in which they lay up to 1000 eggs. The larvae hatch and climb up amongst nectar-rich flowers where they wait... until a passing solitary bee stops for a top up of nectar, at which point the oil beetle larvae jump aboard and hitch a ride back to the bee's nest! Here they grow up, chomping away on the bee's stores of pollen and nectar, as well as bee eggs. They overwinter in the poor bee's nests, before emerging next spring as an adult oil beetle, ready to bumble about the grassland again! Pretty cool...
The three we found were all males, as shown by the odd kink in the antennae.
Less glamorous perhaps, but no less interesting, we found four species of carrion beetle hanging around the bodies of a Red Grouse and a Mountain Hare, including the wonderful Red-breasted Carrion Beetle Oeceoptoma thoracicum (below).
With singing Ring Ouzel, Curlew and Golden Plover, several handsome Mountain Hares still in very white pelage and an amazing flight of 100 or more male Emperor Moths over the moorland on the hunt for the hidden, recently-emerged females, all in all it was a wonderful day on the moors...
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