Coffee berry borer
The coffee berry borer is a tiny black beetle, smaller than a grain of rice. The mum drills a hole into a coffee berry and lays her eggs inside the bean. It is the biggest pest of coffee plants in the whole world.
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Fun facts
Up to 100 beetles can live inside one single coffee berry.
There are about 13 girls for every boy. The boys never leave the berry where they were born.
Only the girls can fly, and only short distances, to find new coffee berries.
Birds like the yellow warbler can eat half of the borers in a coffee farm.
It hates drying out, so it waits for the rain before leaving the berry.
Most asked questions about Coffee berry borer
?How does the coffee berry borer eat caffeine?
Tiny germs in its gut break the caffeine down, so the beetle can eat coffee beans safely.
?How big is a coffee berry borer?
Only about 1.2 to 1.8 millimetres long, smaller than a grain of rice.
?Is the coffee berry borer dangerous?
Not to people. It is only a problem for coffee farmers.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Hypothenemus hampei
- Group
- Beetles
- Family
- Curculionidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Coleoptera > Curculionidae
- Lives on
- Africa, South America, North America, Asia, Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Coffee borer, Coffee weevil
Where the facts come from
- Hypothenemus hampei (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 L. Shyamal. CC BY-SA 3.0, 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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