Heather Beetle 2017!

An adult heather beetle

With warmer days and rising temperatures, heather beetles have been on the move. Dry conditions have helped to create the right conditions for heather burning, but beetles have been conspicuous as they begin to emerge from hibernation and start to disperse across open ground. We usually receive our first reports of beetles "out and about" in late March and early April, and some dispersals can be extremely dramatic. In previous years, gamekeepers have reported plagues of beetles which are so dense that they have had to use windscreen wipers on their vehicles in order to see where they're going. These are extreme cases, and most beetle dispersals will be subtle affairs as adults begin to search for breeding grounds and mates. The Trust's Project Manager Patrick Laurie saw a few beetles  on Sunday 26th, and it's not surprising that small numbers of these native insects should be moving around at this time of year.

The majority of beetle damage is caused in midsummer when beetle larvae emerge from their eggs and start to feed on fresh heather growth. Serious problems can be caused at this stage, and while a good deal of heather will simply regenerate and come back in subsequent years, extreme cases can result in the total death and destruction of thousands of acres of heather in a single season. When beetle attacks become cyclical, they can result in the total and permanent loss of heather coverage, and the Heather Trust believes that beetles may have been the driving force behind heather loss in some wetter western areas where damaged heather is easily over-grown by invasive grasses.

The Heather Trust has led the way on research into heather beetle for the past ten years, running the only national survey of beetle damage and funding important research into heather restoration after beetle outbreaks. We'd be very interested to hear from you if you see beetles dispersing this spring or if you've witnessed beetle damage in the past - let us know, view our previous surveys and find out more about heather beetles on our heather beetle page.