British beetle guide

Beetles — chunky, glossy, striking, and hyper-diverse in colour, form and life history — what’s not to love?

With over 4,000 species in the British Isles, mostly very small, beetles are often portrayed as being a ‘difficult’ group, the preserve of experts, but many are large and brightly coloured and easy to identify in the field.

Confirmations can always be sought at the ‘I spot nature‘ identification site where your uploaded photos (of beetles, and indeed any organism) are regularly checked by experts and enthusiasts.

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Green tiger beetle

With long legs and sharp jaws, this fearsome predator takes short flying leaps to attack prey or escape. It is very active on patches of sparsely vegetated or bare sandy or chalky soil.

Cockchafer

Rose chafer

Twenty-two-spot ladybird

Devil’s coach-horse 

Red-headed cardinal beetle

Green tortoise beetle

Wasp beetle

Stag beetle

The UK’s largest beetle spends most of its life out of view. The larva feeds on dead wood below ground for five years before emerging as an adult. Only the male possesses the ‘antlers’, which are infact enlarged jaws. The stag beetle has declined due to a loss of dead wood habitat.

Bloody nosed beetle

This handsome black beetle is flightless and can be seen walking along the ground or in low vegetation in April. It’s often found in coastal areas and on grasslands in the south of the UK. The beetle’s name comes from its defence strategy of exuding bright red fluid from its mouth when threatened.

Dor beetle

This large beetle has a distinctive black domed body that shines blue or violet in the light. It feeds on dung and is found in grasslands and woodlands grazed by sheep or cattle. The endless munching of dor beetles saves from being knee deep in animal dung. 

Sexton beetle

This distinctive beetle has a black and orange patterning on its wing cases. It performs an important service in burying and recycling carrion (usually small mammals and birds). Its antennae are packed full of receptors enabling it to smell a dead animal up to a mile away.

Harlequin ladybird

The most invasive ladybird, the harlequin arrived in Britain in 2004 and has spread rapidly. This beetle has the potential to jeopardise many of our native ladybird species through competing for food or eating their larvae. It is very variable in appearance. 

Great diving beetle

Both larvae and adults are voracious predators of tadpoles, aquatic insect larvae and small fish. The larvae have a scorpion-like appearance and live underwater for two years before transforming into the adult beetle. The 3cm long adults come to the surface regular to replenish their air supply by sticking their abdomen’s out of the water. 

Thick legged flower beetle

This spectacular shiny metallic green beetle is most often seen on flowers such as daisy, cow parsley and hawthorn blossom. Only the male has the thickened ‘thighs’ that give the beetle its name; it uses them to impress females. The larvae live in hollow plant stems.

Glow worm

The glow worm is not a worm but a beetle. Adult female glow worms are famed for their glow; they are wingless and double the size of the males. Glow worms like chalky or limestone grassland where there are plenty of snails and slugs for their larvae to feed on.

Images ©Getty, Alamy, Naturepl.com