They hatched. Rhinoceros beetles. This summer we welcomed a pair from a child’s friend’s house on June 10. That night (early the next morning) a fierce rustle came from the plastic
case. The male looked ready to crush the female = photo left.
The week before last, the pair that should have been under the soil by day stayed on the surface. We moved them to another case and dug. Out they came — twenty-two larvae. The large ones about three centimeters = top photo, the small under five millimeters = upper right. They look translucent; a little cute, no? Three eggs as well = lower left; if those hatch, twenty-five. Books say one pair lays thirty to fifty eggs, so maybe
more would come. Then last week the female died. The male was still alive as of the morning of the 19th, and a few more larvae seem to have been born.
In May we had been given two larvae; they grew to five or six centimeters and died. How many of the twenty-five will become adults?
Guides say “about five larvae in a large case about 30 centimeters wide.” Already three cases of mixed size occupy our narrow entry; thinking we may need two or three more large
cases is heavy.
By the way, almost every household in the same building with kindergarten, daycare, or elementary children already has beetles, and more blessed events keep coming. There seem to be no grooms or brides left to send.
Quite a few homes, I suspect, have a slightly scared child and a mother as keeper. A talk with that keeper:
♡ “I can’t keep this many~”
♠ “Right, right”
♡ “Keep them at Palaceside Building?”
♠ “What nonsense is that”
♡ “Release them at the Palace?”
♠ “And if they get angry?!”
So we will look for sawtooth oak in a nearby park.
And still. That aiko made a love song of such a beetle — “I, lured by a sweet smell, am a rhinoceros beetle” — is amazing, I keep thinking these days.