Therapy with medicine beetles is carried out in a very unappetizing way: they are offered to eat them alive, washed down with kefir or eaten with bread crumbs. Moreover, the “therapeutic dose” is not limited to one insect - starting with one individual, the amount eaten must be increased to several dozen pieces at a time. Only in this case is a healing effect promised.
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Life hacker found out everything about what medicine beetles are and whether eating them can really improve your health.
ladybugs
Even a child knows these cute, bright beetles. And here is something that would be useful for summer residents to know about them: ladybugs and their larvae are more active than many in destroying aphids, scale insects, and copperheads on the site. An adult insect eats several dozen aphids a day, and its larvae eat ten times more.
Ladybug larva
Thanks to this, ladybugs are literally necessary in every area, especially in gardens and flower beds, where aphids become a real scourge, destroying the leaves of apple trees, pears, roses and other plants.
Ladybugs wake up in the spring, actively feed and reproduce throughout the warm period, and with the onset of cold weather they look for shelter. To attract these insects to your site, you need to provide them with houses. For this purpose, both decorative industrial shelters and hollow stems tied in bunches, sprinkled with peat or sawdust, laid in secluded corners of the garden can be used.
- How to attract living helpers to the garden?
Don’t know how to fill your area with life and attract beneficial insects and birds? To do this, just follow a few tips.
Features of the species
The number of animal species of this class on the planet significantly exceeds the number of other groups. To date, more than 625 thousand of their species are known. The most common beetles are the common beetles, which have hard front wings.
There is also a division based on the nature of nutrition. Among them there are three groups:
- Those that eat other insects (ladybugs, mantises).
- Those that eat waste from the decomposition of plants and animals (dead eaters, gravediggers).
- Feeding on plants (chafer beetles, leaf beetles, beetles).
It is worth noting that some types of ladybugs are specially bred in laboratory conditions. This is necessary in order to subsequently release them into greenhouses and gardens to destroy aphids.
Dead eaters and gravediggers are nature's orderlies. They prevent environmental pollution from waste from decaying living organisms.
Ground beetles
100 larvae per day or 5 average caterpillars - this is exactly the diet of the average ground beetle in your area. They are capable of eating not only eggs, pupae and larvae of harmful insects, but also adults and even small slugs. By the way, even birds are not a hindrance to large ground beetles - at the first sign of danger, they release a repellent substance and remain unharmed.
Not all ground beetles are equally useful - the small (about 1.5 cm) ground beetle is not far from other pests.
Ground beetles overwinter under bark, in piles of moss, sawdust, peat or humus, as well as under stones, so in the fall, do not clear your property too thoroughly, leave the houses of beneficial insects. By the way, ground beetles live 3-5 years, so they will help you for more than one season.
Ground beetle larva
Red Book
Considering the importance of insects in nature, some of their endangered species are subject to protection.
To date, about 95 species that are on the verge of extinction are listed in the Red Book. The majority of rare insects are beetles (36 species). These include alpine longhorned beetles, ground beetles, beauty beetles and others.
There are 33 species of butterflies in the Red Book - Apollo, Bluebirds, Ursa and others. 23 species of Hymenoptera are subject to protection. Among them there are seemingly common insects - bees and bumblebees. The remaining two species are dragonflies.
Firefighter beetles (soft beetles)
The red and black beetle is also striking and known for its appearance. True, its usefulness is quite relative - when there are not enough insects on the site, it is quite capable of switching to plant food and starting to nibble on buds and ovaries.
But it is rare that a dacha can boast of the absence of pests, so the fire beetle easily finds protein food for itself. By the way, the division of his nutritional priorities depending on age is also interesting. Adult softworms eat adult pests, while larvae prefer to eat eggs, larvae and pupae.
Fire beetle larva
Disease carriers
The role of insects in nature is also associated with danger. Thus, some of their species are carriers of pathogens. These are mosquitoes, mosquitoes, bedbugs and others.
Endoparasites are often insects still in the larval stage. For example, they can settle in the body of cattle and cause serious harm to livestock. In addition, danger hangs over humans. Blood-sucking insects are capable of infecting with pathogenic microbes, as well as parasitic worms. Routes of transmission: through food (fly), bites (mosquito, tick).
Lacewings
Lacewings, sometimes mistakenly called lacewings for their delicate yellow-green wings, are not important in themselves in protecting the garden from insects, but their larvae are the real heroes of this war for the harvest. Each larva destroys up to one and a half hundred aphids, scale insects, small mites, etc. per day. Moreover, over the summer, 2 generations of lacewings hatch, each of which actively seeks food for 3 weeks.
Lacewing larvae are quite cunning - they hide from ants that pose a danger to them, disguising themselves as aphids.
Lacewing larva
Caring for offspring
Why do carrion beetles need animal corpses? Adult beetles feed mostly on insects rather than carrion.
When a beetle discovers carrion, it carefully inspects the area and evaluates the soil. After this, the gravedigger begins to dig the earth around the dead animal using his paws. In males, the body structure is more adapted to digging, since their paws are more expanded than the paws of females.
When a mound of earth forms around the dead animal, the beetle continues to dig under the corpse, while it sinks deeper into the soil. As a rule, gravediggers bury corpses to a depth of about 30-50 centimeters.
After mating, the female drives away the male and makes a passage away from the dead carcass. In the resulting small chamber, she lays several dozen eggs. This niche is called a brood chamber. After this, the female regurgitates the contents of the digestive tract into the animal’s corpse. Digestive juice will dissolve the flesh and turn it into a nutritious mass on which the offspring will feed.
By decomposing the corpses of animals, the gravedigger clears the fauna of unnecessary remains.
For several days, the female does not leave the eggs and takes care of them: licks them and turns them over, thus protecting them from mold.
After some time, blind white larvae emerge from the eggs. They have underdeveloped limbs. They crawl along the trench to the remains of the animal and begin to feed. The larvae are very voracious. They stay underground for about 12 days, and they quickly gain weight and develop. During their stay underground, the larvae molt 4 times. And then comes the pupal phase. This phase does not last long - after 2 weeks an adult beetle appears.
Tachin fly larvae
The fluffy and big-eyed hedgehog (more precisely, an adult) interests you solely as a potential parent for a generation of larvae. But they are capable of eliminating such pests as leaf rollers, sawflies, moths, silkworms, moths, bedbugs, Colorado potato beetles, etc. in the garden.
Depending on the type of fly, the larvae can hunt in different ways. Some of them bite into the prey themselves, others are laid by an adult fly in the victim’s body, others lie quietly in the egg and wait until the naive caterpillar eats the “surprise”.
What are medicine beetles?
Under the name of the healer beetle (also known as the healer beetle) hides the darkling beetle from the family Tenebrionidae. This is a small coleopteran insect pest that feeds on grain crops. The misfortune of this species of darkling beetle, Ulomoides dermestoides, is the fact that at one time they were included in the list of traditional medicines of Japan and China. People believed that eating Coleoptera pests would relieve lower back pain, cough, asthma and other problems.
At the end of the 20th century, the beetle gained popularity Argentine Rx: Take 70 Beetles And Call Me in the Morning in Argentina and Brazil. Darkling beetles were raised on home farms and sold in bulk, in quantities of 1,000 or more. Sellers claimed that eating live bugs could alleviate or cure ailments such as psoriasis, Parkinson's disease, diabetes, arthritis, AIDS and cancer.
It was then that darkling beetles acquired their common English name - Chinese beetles (Chinese beatles), or Chinese weevils. And then the spread of medicinal beetle eating around the world began.
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