Heh, they are called May Beetles over here. And yeah they started turning up the past few weeks here and there.
TIL calling beetles by the month they appear in is a mess. In Europe, may beetles are Melolontha, june beetles are Amphimallon (or Mimela), july beetles are Anomala (at least in German). Rhizotrogus is also in the mix, but didn’t get a month assigned.
But then in North America, there are different genera for each month. Phyllophaga in may, Cotinis and Polyphylla in june, none in july…
The UK, in my experience, does not do “screens”.
They also frequently do not do air-conditioning.
They seem to like to raw-dog the woes of summer.
Until recently, summer hasn’t really warranted air conditioning, you could get by pretty neatly with just fans when it was particularly hot
In some areas and times, cockchafers were served as food. A 19th-century recipe from France for cockchafer soup reads: “roast one pound of cockchafers without wings and legs in sizzling butter, then cook them in a chicken soup, add some veal liver and serve with chives on a toast”. A German newspaper from Fulda from the 1920s tells of students eating sugar-coated cockchafers. Cockchafer larvae can also be fried or cooked over open flames, although they require some preparation by soaking in vinegar in order to purge them of soil in their digestive tracts.[14] A cockchafer stew is referred to in W. G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants.
MAYBUG
