Birch sawfly
The birch sawfly is a big, shiny black insect with smoky brown wings and strong jaws. Its babies look just like caterpillars and munch birch leaves.
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Fun facts
Its larva is pale bluish green with a thin dark blue stripe down its back and grows to about 4.5 centimetres long.
Even though its larva looks like a caterpillar, it is not a butterfly baby but a relative of wasps.
The male has a white band and a big red-brown band on his black tail end.
Its feelers are black at the bottom and yellow-orange at the tip.
The grown-ups fly from May to August.
Most asked questions about Birch sawfly
?What does the birch sawfly eat?
Its larvae eat birch leaves.
?How big is a birch sawfly?
About 17 to 23 millimetres long, about as long as two fingernails.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Cimbex femoratus
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Cimbicidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Cimbicidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, North America
Where the facts come from
- Cimbex femoratus (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Aleksey Gnilenkov. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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