Big ol' beetle

An Oil Beetle posing on my gardening glove. Not the first I've seen this year but certainly another harbinger of spring, along with the razorbills and the rhubarb.

I stopped at this point to wonder what harbinger  actually means and discovered it's a15thC. word for 'one sent ahead to arrange lodgings' eg for an army or a monarch. It comes from the old French  and German words for shelter/lodgings, from which harbour also derives. 

Oddly enough this is highly relevant to my oil beetle's  emergence. These gravid females so often seen at this time of year are in fact searching for lodgings/shelter in the form of soft soil in which to lay their eggs. The thousands of tiny larvae that hatch out, looking nothing like the adult beetles, begin an extraordinary life cycle in conjunction with solitary mining bees. They climb to the tops of flowering plants in order to hitch a ride on a visiting bee,  back to its nest where the beetle larva will continue its life as a parasite, feeding upon the bee grubs and the stores of pollen and nectar,  until it is ready to emerge as a adult.

This form of parasitism sounds disturbing and in fact someone on an insect social media group recently suggested killing the beetles to save the bees (!) But in reality the presence of oil beetles indicates a healthy population of solitary mining bees (which are suffering from habitat loss). It's an interspecies connection that has evolved in tandem  over the ages and  may even carry some sort of benefit for the bees of which we are unaware.

Harbinger has come to have a negative connotation - harbinger of doom and so on. I imagine that when the medieval accommodations officer rolled up to make preparations for the arrival of a royal party or a battalion of soldiers everyone's hearts sank as they foresaw their food stores, livestock and best bedding commandeered for the purpose. 

Nevertheless both bees and beetles appear to be flourishing in my garden.