Beetle Tales Dipped In Butter

This bad boy of the beetle world was flying around our property last week. Normally I don't see many beetles in the yard, mostly for lack of looking, but when something looking like an armoured Tim Bit flies past your face, you can't help but notice.

I have no idea what this beetle does for a living. It might feed off dung in which case it was on the wrong side of the fence. It might eat pine trees in which case it found Mecca.

Beetles are curious. They carry their own steel plated exo-skeleton, yet they can fly. They're like Grumman Avengers. I wouldn't want to be avenged by one. Imagine enlarging one to human size. Many of those sci-fi movies I've never watched feature giant insects. It makes me wonder if there are some very successful entomologists in Hollywood.

When this beetle arrived in our yard it sparked a conversation about lobsters. We had joked about eating this beetle, then I made the point that a lobster is nothing more than an over-sized underwater beetle. Think about it. Lobsters look and behave like insects. So do shrimp....and we love them. We butter them up and then wolf them down. Aaaaaoooooooooowww.

If you were starving to death, would you eat a beetle? I would. Okay, let's up the ante....would you eat an earthworm? I'm not sure I could do that, but there used to be a show on television where the contestants would. Fear Factor. Of course many of them gagged and hurled immediately afterwards. If people will eat insects for money, surely they would eat them for survival. Thankfully we're not there yet as a society, at least not in the western world. Perhaps one day we'll all go to the McDonald's drive-thru and order a Big Mac and flies. Maybe we already have, and we simply didn't know it.