the beetle yard

so after we cut the tree down, we had a ton of carnage to deal with.

the whole yard was covered in branches and sticks and logs.

we started moving it all around, trying to consolidate all the big logs to one section of yard.

the small sticks and really rotting wood got taken to the dump.
while we were moving logs around, our Boston Terrier puppy started digging in a rotten section of one big log, and dug out a grub.

we ended up pulling a whole bunch of them out!

some of them were wrapped in dirt balls...
i decided to let them finish their transformation in the house...i took a huge storage jar and filled it with rotting wood and some loose soil, and put the grubs in it. i misted it every now and again with water, but mostly it sat on the mantle and i left it alone.
since i'd found the giant click beetle in the fallen logs, i was hoping i might end up with a bunch of those guys, but really i wasn't sure what they were going to be.
one morning i heard some noise coming from the jar and went to check it out.

we had beetles!
i wasn't sure what they were, but their body shape was much more scarab like than other beetles...i had a general idea of what family to start looking in.

after a few days, and consulting with the mom (she knows EVERYTHING!) i found that they were Hermit Beetles, a scarab family beetle that decomposes wood/plant matter, notorious for their grubs starting life in dirt balls! that explains the grubs in their casing!
i tossed em some apple slices to tide them over until the weekend, i wanted to release them back into the yard but i also wanted to take better pictures of them and time is tight during the weekdays.

i released them back into the huge rotting tree stump that remained after the arborists cut down the silver maple. hope to see them again sometime!