Field Trip: Beetles!

Found this handsome creature on the beach on Nantucket, where it was not doing well with the shifting, treacherous, sisyphean sands. The good folks at Bug Guide identified it for me as Tricrania sanguinipennis. Like the oil beetles we found at Jamaica Bay, these parasitize ground nesting bees.

Euphoria inda, the bumble flower scarab, found climbing a concrete pier at the Hyannis Transportation Center. Also, found in Arthur Evan’s Field Guide to Insects and Spiders of North America. Pay no attention to the iffy focus and just look at those amazing three-part clubs on the antennae. In flight, this is supposed to look and sound like a bumblebee. In climbing, it fell off the pier (ouch!) and made a very exoskeletony crash landing on its back, righting itself without difficulty, but then climbing back up the concrete mountain.