Wheat weevil
The wheat weevil is a tiny reddish brown beetle with a long snout, like a little elephant trunk. It lives in stores of grain, like wheat, oats and rice. Its babies grow up hidden inside a single grain.
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Fun facts
It cannot fly, even though it is a beetle.
The mother chews a hole in a grain, lays one egg inside and seals the hole shut.
It is never found in the wild, only where people keep grain.
When it is scared, it pulls in its legs and plays dead.
One pair of weevils can have up to 6,000 young in a year.
Most asked questions about Wheat weevil
?How do wheat weevils get into food?
They live in stored grain. The babies grow inside the grains, so they are hard to spot.
?Are wheat weevils harmful?
They do not hurt people, but they eat stored grain and can spoil a whole store of it.
?How big is a wheat weevil?
It is only about 3 to 5 millimetres long.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Sitophilus granarius
- Group
- Beetles
- Family
- Curculionidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Coleoptera > Curculionidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Grain weevil, Granary weevil
Where the facts come from
- Wheat weevil (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 Desmond W. Helmore. CC BY 4.0, 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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