Beetles & Weevils

If you have ever found a tiny, hard-shelled bug doing a slow crawl across your kitchen counter or leaving fine, flour-like dust by a wooden floorboard, you are almost certainly looking at a member of the vast beetle and weevil family. What glues these creatures into a single group is not just their appetite for your groceries or furniture, but a remarkably consistent piece of body armor. Every single one of them, from the smallest pantry pest to the largest wood borer, carries hard forewings known as elytra that meet in a dead-straight seam down the middle of the back, creating a tough protective shell over their flight wings.
People frequently confuse these hard-backed insects with clothes moths, pantry moths, booklice, or silverfish, but the giveaway is usually right in front of you. Moths have soft, powdery, or fringed wings and fly with a fluttery motion, while booklice and silverfish are soft-bodied and dart away without any protective shell. If you press on a pest and it feels crunchy or armor-plated rather than squishy, you have a beetle on your hands. Sorting them out from there depends on where you find them, whether they are chewing through your woolen sweaters or your breakfast cereal, and whether their antennae are clubbed or saw-toothed.
Explore beetles & weevils
Common furniture beetleAnobium punctatum
Old house borerHylotrupes bajulus
Powderpost beetlesSubfamily Lyctinae
Rice weevilSitophilus oryzae
Granary weevilSitophilus granarius
Maize weevilSitophilus zeamais
Red flour beetleTribolium castaneum
Confused flour beetleTribolium confusum
Sawtoothed grain beetleOryzaephilus surinamensis
Drugstore beetleStegobium paniceum
Cigarette beetleLasioderma serricorne
Varied carpet beetleAnthrenus verbasci
Black carpet beetleAttagenus unicolor
Furniture carpet beetleAnthrenus flavipes
Multicolored Asian lady beetleHarmonia axyridis
Japanese beetlePopillia japonica
Black vine weevilOtiorhynchus sulcatus
Striped cucumber beetleAcalymma vittatum
Colorado potato beetleLeptinotarsa decemlineata
Plum curculioConotrachelus nenuphar
Emerald ash borerAgrilus planipennis
Asian longhorned beetleAnoplophora glabripennis