H is for Hey! You!...

 ...get off of my clo...er...Flower!

These are probably my favourite UK beetle, there is a small one which looks just like a little apple-green metal scarab I really like but I haven't seen any since I was about 11. This also looks like a scarab type but is in fact a chafer, the Rose Chafer (Cetonia Aurata) or Green Rose Chafer and Mum's garden is always good for one or two at this time of year, this year there were three over a couple of days...bargain!

These are very slow and measured in their movement but still appear clumsy and always remind me of Sloths! The one pictured above was the first, and this little plant (the name of which is unknown to me) was covered in insects on the day I took these and we will come back to it in the next few days.

Looks like a rose but it's actually a flowering shrub-current, they do very little damage to roses, eating a few holes in the odd petal or perhaps a whole petal if it's a particularly tender one, or if the chafer is particularly hungry! Mostly they seem to help themselves to the same pollen and nectar that the bees enjoy, hence the accidental encounter in the top image, I only saw it after I'd uploaded the photographs.

The apparent cracks in the wing cases are actually markings in a pale creamy-white and when they are on a rose leaf the camouflage effect is very good indeed, especially the older leaves which take on metallic hues with thin pale marks themselves.

As can be seen from these examples, they can vary from a quite uniform metallic green through to one I saw the other day (without a camera) that was almost totally bronze, like the size of the antlers on the stag beetles, I suspect it is about age, with the greener ones being younger, but that's just me and might be wholly inaccurate! It may be more like hair colour?