Local insects and animals- Elephant beetles

Look who flew into our humpy one night this week.

You can't tell from the photo, but this is one ENORMOUS beetle. The elephant beetle, or Xylotrupes ulysses grows to an average size of 60 mm long. Our visitor was a female as she didn't have the distinctive 'horns' on the front. She buzzed in like a small aircraft and proceeded to circle the light in ever diminishing spirals, when she landed we caught her for a closer look and a photo session (bug paparazzi). It is fairly rare to be able to call an insect 'he' or 'she' but the elephant beetle is sexually dimorphic (male and female look different) so it makes using the right pronoun that much easier.
Elephant beetles eat decaying organic matter so they are useful in the compost heap. The females lay about 50 eggs at a time although lots of the larval stage (white curl grubs) end up as food for foraging animals. They have a particular affinity with scrub turkey nests (big compost heaps) so I am now wondering if we have one nearby.
Adult beetles feed on new leaf shoots and have been classified as a native pest in some areas because of their habit of gathering together on specific trees (apparently this is the beetle version of a night club; where they go to find mates) resulting in damage to the tree..

She is a most impressive beetle.

Personally, I don't see these beetles as a pest, but as just another member of my ecosystem. I plan to leave some piles of organic matter around for them to lay in and maybe harvest some grubs for the chooks at a later stage.
Have you seen these beetles where you live?

local insects and animals- Black flower wasps

Today I decided to add a new section to my blog; local insects and animals. Every so often we find an unknown insect or animal around the humpy and it causes a rush towards the book shelves and the computer to find out what it is and what it does. From now on I will add the results of these research missions to my blog (partly so I have a record of what we have already researched, as I suspect we have looked up some things more than once and forgotten the results).

Today's bug is.......the black flower wasp

My youngest daughter captured this photo of a black flower wasp on the lantana.

Haven't they got pretty wings.

My youngest daughter was fascinated by the lovely blue colour of the wings and by their solitary nature. According to the CSIRO these wasps are solitary wasps who are responsible for pollinating many Australian natives (and a few exotics too) they lay eggs in caterpillars to reproduce. So many Australian native insects tend to be solitary, I wonder why they have evolved this way?
Given the worrying drop in the bee population of the world, I think it is important to encourage other insects who are capable of pollinating our food crops, or we may find ourselves very hungry. While the black flower wasp is known to pollinate mostly native plants, there is so little research on them that they may also play a large part in pollinating high nectar food plants like pumpkin, melons and marrow.
They enjoy high nectar plants and undisturbed mulched areas, so make sure you have some of this habitat in your garden and you will have these delightful wasps to entertain you and help control Caterpillar populations.