Webinar Date: July 28, 2026
Speaker: Dr. Joe McHugh, Herbert H. and Jean A. Ross Memorial Distinguished Professor of Insect Systematics and Evolutionary Biology, Department of Entomology, University of Georgia; Curator of Arthropods, Georgia Museum of Natural History
Host: Becky Griffin, National Coordinator, Great Southeast Pollinator Census
Co-host: Rich Braman, UGA Center for Urban Agriculture
Also speaking: Amanda Bratcher, NC Cooperative Extension, North Carolina State Coordinator
Duration: 1:13:54
Series: Great Southeast Pollinator Course
Credit: No applicator CEU. Educators who attended the live session earned 1 PLU. No credit attaches to viewing this recording.
About This Session
Week Seven closes the course, and it is the only session with a single presenter. Dr. Joe McHugh joined from a public library in Vergennes, Vermont, where he had gone to help his daughter move, and he opened by naming his own bias. He is a beetle systematist, not an ecologist or a pollination biologist, so the talk works out from beetle biology toward pollination instead of starting there. He gave one warning before anything else: with beetles there is an exception to every rule, so nearly everything that follows is a partial truth.
Anatomy came first, because it drives the rest. The elytra, the hardened front wings behind the name Coleoptera (“sheath wing”), are the trade at the center of beetle biology. Beetles gave up their primary flight wings for armor, which let them bore wood, burrow, crawl through rock, and swim while still flying on the hind wings alone, a condition called posteromotorism. The cost is clumsy flight and a rigid, tightly plated body that McHugh called a tank. Their mandibles bite and chew rather than lapping or sucking, so unlike bees, butterflies, and flies, beetles cannot drink nectar. Their antennae carry sensoria tuned to chemical and thermal cues, which is what a beetle-pollinated flower puts out.
Then the history, which runs further back than the flowers do. McHugh set his reference points: the dog family at roughly 40 million years, dinosaurs at somewhere around 230 million, and beetles at 300 million and older. They were pollinating cycad forests and other gymnosperms more than 150 million years ago, before bees, before butterflies, and before there were angiosperms to visit. He called them the pioneers of the pollinating world, and pointed at cycads, water lilies, and magnolias as places that connection still shows.
Diversity is his own field and the section he clearly enjoyed most. The weevil family alone holds about 65,000 species against 35 in the dog family and 270 in the entire order Carnivora, and weevils are not even the largest beetle family. Coleoptera has about 400,000 described species against roughly 320,000 plants, which makes one in every four described animal species a beetle. Estimates of the real figure, he said, run from a million to eight million and up. He then ran a stretch showing that whatever animal you can picture, there is a beetle version of it: elephants, giraffes, horns, and beetles that mimic stinging wasps.
At 32:35 he named the term for beetle pollination, cantharophily, and called beetles “mess and soil” pollinators, part dust mop and part tractor. They chew the petals and the sexual parts, mate on the flower, and defecate on it while they work. Flowers that specialize for beetles answer with strong fruity, spicy, fermenting, or musky fragrance, daytime opening that spreads the scent on the heat, coloring in white, yellow, pale green, or burgundy, no nectar guides, and a wide landing pad a bad flier can flop onto. Pollination happens only in the adult stage; the larvae of beetle pollinators are usually borers, detritivores, or soil dwellers with no connection to flowers at all.
The last nine minutes of the presentation are the part census volunteers should watch twice: eight southeastern groups, each with the field characters that separate it, from 37:30 to 46:37. He closed on the line Griffin picked up afterward, that being a clumsy flier and a sloppy, destructive diner does not stop you from being an important pollinator. Griffin took the final twenty-two minutes for census wrap-up, including a count form that now has a beetle on it.
Chapters (Video Timestamps)
0:00 Welcome and the final session of the course
1:18 Griffin introduces Dr. Joe McHugh
4:46 The pollinator lineup, and who was missing
6:04 What is a beetle? Aristotle to Linnaeus
7:31 Anatomy, and a warning about exceptions
9:33 Coleoptera means sheath wing
10:42 Posteromotorism: flying on the hind wings alone
11:33 Armor plating and why beetles fly badly
13:04 Mandibulate mouthparts, and what weevils do
14:19 Beetles cannot drink nectar
15:03 Antennae, sensoria, and chemical cues
16:03 History: dating the beetle lineage
17:52 Beetles at 300 million, older than dinosaurs
18:24 Pollinating before bees and before flowers
19:01 Cycads, water lilies, and magnolias today
19:23 Diversity, and the systematist’s bias
20:35 35 dog species against 65,000 weevils
20:51 Weevils against the whole order Carnivora
22:27 400,000 beetles against 320,000 plants
23:13 One in four animal species is a beetle
24:18 The beetleverse: elephants, giraffes, horns
25:08 Beetles that mimic stinging wasps
27:10 Bess beetles and parental care
28:10 Setae: the fuzzy beetles that carry pollen
28:52 The 2015 phylogeny with Duane McKenna
30:00 Biology: complete metamorphosis
30:38 The larva is the long-lived, hungry stage
30:54 Pollination happens only in the adult
32:35 Cantharophily, and mess and soil pollinators
33:59 The beetle pollination syndrome
34:13 Fragrance: fruity, spicy, fermenting, musky
35:19 Color, nectar guides, and what beetles ignore
36:03 Flower shape: a landing pad to flop onto
37:30 The usual suspects in the Southeast
38:44 Scarabaeidae: scarabs, June beetles, chafers
39:46 Cerambycidae: the longhorn beetles
40:43 Chrysomelidae: the leaf beetles
41:37 Cantharidae: the soldier beetles
42:27 Meloids: blister beetles and cantharidin
43:29 Click beetles: the hinge and the tooth
44:25 Nitidulidae: sap, picnic, and pollen beetles
45:23 Nitidulids pollinate the pawpaw
45:39 Mordellids: the tumbling flower beetles
46:37 References: bugguide.net and the Evans guide
47:42 Clumsy, sloppy, and still an important pollinator
48:28 Griffin on the closing slide, then questions
48:47 Q&A: how do beetles get water?
50:19 Q&A: are vespids as old as their beetle mimics?
51:18 Griffin takes over: census wrap-up
52:09 What goes in the “other insect” category
53:23 August 21 and 22: this year’s census
54:37 The 2026 “I Counted” sticker: lady beetles
55:18 Insect mascots, free to use
57:42 Getting counts uploaded at your event
58:47 New this year: counting on your phone
59:46 The two Facebook pages and what each is for
1:02:49 594 schools counted last year
1:04:03 Dedicated to Walter Reeves
1:05:41 Braman on the count page and the QR code
1:09:11 Mississippi joins the census
1:10:05 Amanda Bratcher on North Carolina’s goal
1:12:44 Closing thanks
Questions & Answers
Q: What actually makes a beetle a beetle?
A: The elytra. Coleoptera translates to “sheath wing,” and McHugh explained the name refers to the anterior pair of wings, the pair that powers flight in most insects, being turned into hard protective shells over the abdomen. That is the seam down the middle of the back and the two hard plates people picture. Underneath, the membranous hind wings are still there, folded and coiled up, so the beetle can pop the elytra open and fly. With the front wings hardened into armor over the abdomen and hind wings, beetles could bore through wood, burrow underground, crawl through rocks, and live and swim underwater, then still fly away. McHugh called it the best of both worlds and an important adaptation. Flying on the hind wings alone is called posteromotorism. The price shows up on a flower: beetles are clumsy fliers, and the tightly abutting armor plates make for a rigid body. McHugh’s word for it was a tank. Flies, Hymenoptera, and Lepidoptera can hover and fly precisely; beetles cannot.
Q: Can a beetle drink nectar?
A: No. Beetles have mandibulate mouthparts, opposed mandibles that work like chisels to pinch, chop, and chew. Bees lap nectar with a tongue, butterflies and moths use a coiled proboscis, and flies use a labellum. Beetles have none of that. Even weevils, whose long rostrum looks like it should work as a straw, have small biting and chewing mandibles at the tip of what is really an elongated head capsule.
Q: How far back does beetle pollination go?
A: Further back than the flowers. McHugh anchored the scale with reference points: the dog family Canidae dates to about 40 million years ago, dinosaurs to somewhere around 230 million. Beetles go back at least 300 million years, older than the dinosaurs and still here in huge numbers. They were actively pollinating cycad forests and other gymnosperms more than 150 million years ago, before there were bees, before there were butterflies, and before there were angiosperms with flowers. He called them the pioneers of the pollinating world. Cycads, water lilies, and magnolias are still beetle-pollinated today, which he described as a remnant of that ancient connection.
Q: Just how many beetles are there?
A: The weevil family alone (Curculionidae) holds about 65,000 species, against roughly 35 species in the dog family and 270 in the entire order Carnivora. Weevils are not even the largest beetle family; Staphylinidae is. The order Coleoptera has about 400,000 described species, more than the roughly 320,000 species in the whole plant kingdom, which makes one in every four described animal species a beetle. McHugh stressed that “described” only counts what someone has formally named. Estimates of actual diversity, he said, range from a million species to eight million and higher.
Q: Do beetle larvae pollinate too?
A: No. Pollination in beetles is always limited to the adult stage. The part that surprises people is how disconnected the two halves of the life cycle are: in beetle species known to be pollinators, the larvae typically have nothing to do with flowers at all. They are borers in wood, detritivores in leaf litter, or soil dwellers. The larva is also the longest-lived stage, sometimes two years or more, and it does most of the feeding.
Q: What is cantharophily, and why does McHugh call beetles “mess and soil” pollinators?
A: Cantharophily is the term for pollination by beetles. The label comes from what they do once they land. They use those chewing mouthparts on the petals and on the sexual parts of the flower, plow their way around doing damage, mate with each other on top of the flower, and defecate on it while they wander. McHugh’s picture was a cross between a dust mop cruising around picking up pollen and a tractor plowing through. Some beetle pollinators carry a vestiture of setae, fine hairs or scales, and that fuzz is what makes the dust mop work.
Q: What does a beetle-pollinated flower look like?
A: Fragrance first: strong, and fruity, spicy, fermenting, or musky. Those flowers open during the day, partly because the heat spreads the scent further. Color runs to white, yellow, pale green, and sometimes reddish-brown or burgundy, but color matters less to beetles than smell and warmth, because their antennal sensoria are reading chemical and thermal cues rather than visual ones. Specialist flowers skip nectar guides entirely, since beetles are not after nectar. The shape is built for a bad flier: a deep bowl with thick fleshy petals, a wide open face like a sunflower, or a broad cluster of tiny flowers. Beetles need a big landing pad to flop onto, then chew pollen and petals while they mill around.
Q: Which beetles am I likely to see on flowers during the census?
A: McHugh ran through eight southeastern groups with their field characters. Scarabs (Scarabaeidae), including June beetles and chafers: stout, humped, with fan-like antennal clubs, toothed front legs, and the abdomen tip usually showing past the elytra. Longhorn beetles (Cerambycidae): elongate, cylindrical or diamond-shaped, with thread-like antennae at least half the body length and shoulder-pad elytra. Leaf beetles (Chrysomelidae): small, oval to round, strongly convex, weevil-like but with no snout, and with fat spongy pads under the tarsi. Soldier beetles (Cantharidae): squishy rather than crunchy, yellow, brown, or reddish with black markings, with soft leathery elytra. They look like fireflies, but in fireflies (Lampyridae) the pronotum covers the whole head; a cantharid’s head shows from above, it has no light organ, and it cannot bioluminesce. Blister beetles (meloids): a neck-like narrowing behind the head, floppy or very short elytra. Click beetles: a hinge between the front and rear body that powers the click, plus a backward-pointing tooth at each rear corner of the pronotum. Sap, picnic, and pollen beetles (Nitidulidae): flattened, with lollipop-on-a-stick antennae and elytra cut straight across, and the known pollinators of pawpaw. Tumbling flower beetles (mordellids): humped back, head tucked underneath, and a long spike off the end of the abdomen.
Q: Should I pick up a blister beetle?
A: No, and the beetle tells you so. McHugh described meloid coloration as aposematic, a bright or contrasting warning pattern. Blister beetles can exude droplets of cantharidin from the joints of the body, and it blisters skin. That is their protective mechanism.
Q: Is there a fruit that depends on beetles?
A: Pawpaw. McHugh said nitidulid beetles are the known pollinators of the pawpaw tree, one of the key pollinators for it, and that pawpaw is the largest edible fruit in North America. Nitidulids are the same family most people already know as picnic beetles, so this is a group census counters will run into.
Q: How do beetles get water if they cannot drink?
A: Mostly from what they eat. Their maxillae and labium can pick up a little liquid, but McHugh said the bigger part of the answer is the digestive system, which has recycling mechanisms for retaining water. Beetles are good enough at it that stored product pests run many generations inside a bag of flour, dog food, or seed for a whole year with no access to free water.
Q: Where does a beetle go on the census count sheet?
A: In the “other insects” category. McHugh noted with some good humor that carpenter bees, bumblebees, honeybees, and small bees each get their own category while beetles do not get one even at the order level. Griffin took the point on air: the original count sheet had no beetle on it, the updated form does, and this year’s “I Counted” sticker features lady beetles in McHugh’s honor.
Resources
Named on-air during the session:
- bugguide.net: McHugh’s recommendation for beetle identification, with photographs of all different kinds of beetles.
- Beetles of Eastern North America, Arthur V. Evans: the book McHugh told the audience to buy if they want to go further. He said it illustrates essentially every beetle genus in the southeastern United States with descriptions, diagnoses, and biological information.
- Georgia Museum of Natural History: McHugh curates the arthropod collection there, over 2.2 million specimens of insects and related arthropods.
- Great Southeast Pollinator Census website: PowerPoints for training a garden club, videos on how to count, educator lessons and games, rack cards and bookmarks, the “I Counted” stickers, and the insect mascot artwork. Griffin told anyone who has not checked it out to do so ASAP.
- Insect mascots by Megan McCoy: created for the census and free to use on T-shirts, hats, flyers, and school signs, with no permission needed.
- Two Facebook pages: the Great Southeast Pollinator Census community page (over 10,000 members, photos and discussion) and a separate Great Southeast Pollinator Census page dedicated to event listings.
- Census newsletter on hosting an event: distributed by MailChimp; sign up through the census website.
- North Carolina resources: Amanda Bratcher has NC State-branded marketing material for event hosts and is building a map of North Carolina census events.
- Image credits for the presentation: canva.com and Bugwood contributors.
Census dates: August 21 and 22, 2026. Uploading opens at 12:01 a.m. on the first day, and counts can be submitted from a phone for the first time this year.
Processed for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / Great Southeast Pollinator Course · gsepc.org
Source: Stage 2 Archive Package, GTBOP_Archive_Summary_2026-07-28_Beetles.md
Secondary source for session structure: GTBOP_ProcessingLog_2026-07-28_Beetles.md