African Fruit Beetle (Pachnoda fissipunctum)

Look at the back of a good Pachnoda fissipunctum and you will see why it stops people mid-scroll: the yellow wing cases carry a deep red-to-black pattern that often reads as a small pale skull. It is one of those markings the eye snaps to at once, and it turns an already smart flower beetle into a proper conversation piece. No two are marked quite alike, so part of the fun is picking out the ones where the skull comes through clearest.

This is a fruit chafer, one of the African flower beetles in the family Scarabaeidae, and it answers to a short list of everyday names: fruit beetle, sun beetle and flower beetle among them. The scientific name, Pachnoda fissipunctum, is the one worth holding onto, because it is a distinct species rather than the far more common Pachnoda marginata that most shops sell. The body is broad and glossy, roughly 25 to 30mm long, in bold yellow banded and blotched with red and black, with a scatter of white dots around the underside. It is an African species, described from the east of the continent, and like the rest of its genus it is one of the easiest beetles you can bring into a collection.

That ease is the real draw. Given a pair of healthy adults and a sensible setup these beetles more or less breed themselves, which makes this a lovely first beetle for anyone stepping across from isopods or springtails. The one idea to hold in your head is that you are really keeping two different animals across a single lifecycle, and each wants something different.

The larvae are fat white grubs that live down in the substrate and eat it, so the substrate is the most important thing you provide. Give them a deep bed, 10 to 15cm at least, of flake soil with hardwood leaf litter and crumbling rotten wood worked through it, kept damp but never waterlogged. They feed and grow through it over a couple of months, build small cocoons in which to pupate, and emerge as adults. Skip softwoods, which do not suit them, and keep the bed deep enough that a grub can always burrow down out of the light.

The adults are the show, and they eat completely differently. They want ripe fruit, banana, pear and melon and the like, and they do very well on beetle jelly, which stays cleaner than fruit alone and covers the occasional need for a little protein. Keep them warm, somewhere between about 20 and 28C with the mid-twenties ideal, at a moderate humidity of roughly 50 to 70 percent with a light misting every few days, and they will stay busy and on view for months. A group settles happily in one enclosure, and the more adults you keep together, the better your odds of eggs.

If you already keep our Stripy Flower Beetle the routine will feel familiar, since the two run to the same fruit-and-flake-soil rhythm, and you will find the rest of the beetles and other oddities on our other inverts for sale page.

The beetles I send out are captive-bred rather than wild-caught, which is part of why they settle in so readily. Whether you order adults ready to pair up or younger larvae to grow on, they travel in a ventilated tub with damp substrate or sphagnum inside an insulated, double-walled box, dispatched Monday to Thursday by Royal Mail next-day delivery, with a heat pack tucked in when the weather is cold and a live arrival guarantee on every order. After twenty-odd years keeping everything from reptiles to roaches, I still think a beetle that breeds itself, feeds on fruit and wears a skull on its back is one of the easiest recommendations I can make.