These beetles have been harder to photograph that we originally thought. They’re too big (and too fast) for our macro capabilities and too small for my regular lens. They’re also prone to covering themselves in moldy fruit goop which isn’t photogenic and is surprisingly difficult to remove. We had one escapee yesterday afternoon that disappeared into the attic space. I had written him off as lost but, according to our administrative staff, he reappeared this morning. They successfully ushered him out the door. That leaves us with a dozen lively beetles. The coworker who brought in the beetles is the proud father of a new baby girl as of yesterday afternoon (congratulations Bob!) so we’re thinking that we should let them go immediately and not wait for him to reappear and take them back to his fig beetle friendly yard.
I managed to get a short video of a beetle in flight which I’ll try to post shortly. We were going to super glue a piece of string to a beetle (to get a cool, controlled-flight shot) but we couldn’t get the string to stick and I was in danger of permanently gluing a bug to my thumb. That wouldn’t have been good for either party. Fortunately, no beetles were harmed during this experiment.
