Cockchafer's white grubs

At the request of a friend, today I looked at a troubled beech with poor foliage in her garden and after removal of the top layer of grass, this is what not only was eating the grass roots, but also gnawing the fine roots of the tree, a mean total of 34 white grubs of Melolontha melolontha per square meter we "harvested" them from. Tomorrow the area free of grass will be "treated" with "benine" nematodes.

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That would be heaven for my chickens !

Thats amazing, they are real ugly suckers arnt they.

And this is what they grow up to be....taken last week.

looks like you found all your fishing bait in 1 square meter! they look very similar to Dynastes Hercules grubs but i guess much smaller. Only reason i know that is because i found a couple munching away at a dead stump when i was staying in Rome and was amazed at the size of the monsters. Here is a pic i took of one of them before i put it back where i found the beauty:thumbup:

I've just bought a pack of the nematodes for lawn treatment; the grubs have wrecked a patch of it over the years. I now know why the green woodpecker's been interested in the same small area for so many years. No point in putting the nematodes down now though; the grubs must be about a foot deep with the soil being so dry.

Thems look alike good tucker mate....................

they look very similar to Dynastes Hercules grubs but i guess much smaller. Only reason i know that is because i found a couple munching away at a dead stump when i was staying in Rome and was amazed at the size of the monsters. Here is a pic i took of one of them before i put it back where i found the beauty:thumbup:

David,

Unless it was an escape from a terrarium, it can not have been a grub of Dynastes Hercules, because it is not an indigenous European species. Probably it was the grub of the European Rhinoceros beetle (Oryctes nasicornis), which is mainly found in the Mediterranian region.

And did you ever find the caterpillar of the Goat Moth (Cossus cossus) ? They can be more then 10 centimetres long and if held, bite and spray acid in the wound. I once had an escape of a full grown grub in the boot of my car, I could not retrieve, until I found it inside a rubber rain boot, of which he already had "consumed" a patch of more then 5 centimetres in a weeks time.

I love this thread.

I love this thread.

The beech didn't. I have never seen so much damage done to the well mycorrhized fine roots of a tree before by these gluttonous beasts, which mainly live from munching grass roots. Maybe the problem arose, because beeches highly depend on rain for their water supply and develop very supercial and close to ground level fine roots, which in this case were densily "interwoven" with grass roots.