So last night—bear with me—I’m half-asleep, toothbrush hanging out of my mouth, and I hear this loud whap against the bathroom light. Thought something had exploded. I turn around, and there it is: this big shiny reddish-brown… thing, clinging to a cardboard toilet paper roll like it just landed after a long-haul flight and decided, “Yeah, this is home now.”
At first, I thought it was a June bug, but nope. It’s something called a cockchafer. I know. It sounds like a bad nickname some Victorian schoolboy would get stuck with. Anyway, people also call it a May bug, which—let’s be honest—makes it sound a lot more charming than it deserves when it’s dive-bombing your ceiling fan at midnight.
Right. So the cockchafer beetle—Melolontha melolontha, if you want to sound fancy about it—is this chunky scarab-looking beetle that shows up around late spring in Europe. May, usually, sometimes into June. Which explains the name. They’re around 2 to 3 cm long (which doesn’t sound like much until it’s buzzing near your face), and the males have these weird fan-like antennae that look like they’re trying to pick up satellite TV. That’s how they smell out the ladies. Very elegant.
Their flight style? Imagine a wind-up toy trying to navigate a hurricane. They don’t fly so much as lurch from surface to surface with alarming confidence and absolutely no coordination.
If you’ve got something vaguely beetle-shaped knocking over your houseplants in May, odds are it’s one of these guys. The telltale signs?
Color : reddish-brown, almost rust-colored wing covers, with a black belly.
: reddish-brown, almost rust-colored wing covers, with a black belly. Antennae : feathery and dramatic on the males—like they’re trying too hard at a masquerade ball.
: feathery and dramatic on the males—like they’re trying too hard at a masquerade ball. Size : bigger than your average beetle. Not quite “horror movie” big, but big enough to ruin your evening.