The May Bug – Britain’s Locust
Once so common and deemed a major agricultural pest, cockchafer numbers sometimes reached biblical proportions, as in Ireland in 1688. “When towards evening or sunset, they would arise, disperse and fly about, with a strange humming noise, much like the beating of drums at some distance; and in such vast incredible numbers, that they darkened the air for the space of two or three miles square”, the naturalist Thomas Molyneux observed. “The grinding of leaves in the mouths of this vast multitude altogether, made a sound very much resembling the sawing of timber”.
France was regularly ravaged by cockchafers. In 1320 the authorities in Avignon hit on a novel method of controlling them, summoning them to court and ordering them, on pain of death, to leave. Unsurprisingly, the stubborn cockchafers ignored the court’s strictures. In 1775 a farmer near Blois employed children and the poor to collect and destroy them, paying a bounty of two liards a hundred, and in a few days, they had collected fourteen thousand.
The Reverend Bingley noted, in Animal Biography (1813), that in 18th century Norfolk cockchafers were so rife that one farmer had collected eighty bushels of them and “the grubs had done so much injury that the court [of Norwich], in compassion to the poor fellow’s misfortune, allowed him twenty-five pounds”.
Well into the twentieth century the arrival of cockchafers en masse was a moment of marvel and dread for farmers and gardeners alike, as The Manchester Guardian’s Country Diary for May 31, 1922, graphically illustrates. Their North Oxfordshire correspondent wrote that “every evening the garden hums with cockchafers”, finding “something pleasantly poetical about their droning, plundering flight”. However, there was a sting in the tail. “They have great appetite and if this season suits their families as well as last would seem to have done, they bid fair to be as thick next year as Egypt’s locusts and will strip the trees; another reason for enjoying to the full this lovely verdure while it is here”.
With such an abundance of grubs and beetles, inevitably their culinary potential was explored. Molyneux recorded that the “poorer sort of Irish native had a way of dressing [cockchafer larvae] and lived upon them as food”. In France, according to Henri Miot’s Les Insectes Utiles (1870), handfuls of freshly harvested cockchafer grubs, seasoned with salt and pepper, rolled in a mix of flour and fine bread crumbs, and wrapped in liberally buttered baking paper or foil, were baked on the hot ashes of a wood fire or in the oven for twenty minutes. “On opening the envelope”, he wrote, “a very appetising odour exhales, which disposes one favourably to the delicacy, which will be more appreciated than snails, and will be declared one of the finest delicacies ever tasted”.
The French Society of Cultivators, keen to establish whether an unbiased palate would eat anything, decided, according to The Food Journal (1871), to experiment on cockchafer larvae. Steeped live in vinegar for twenty-four hours, they were then dipped in a light batter made of egg, milk, and flour, and fried until golden brown. Served hot and crisp, at the Society’s banquet held at the Café Corazza in the Palais Royal in Paris, “two were placed on each plate, and it is boastfully recorded that those who ate one ate the other. But more; there were eighty guests and 200 worms, so perhaps some might have had three”.
Approximately thirty adult cockchafers, with their legs and wings removed, fried in butter and then cooked in a chicken or veal broth, made a single serving of a soup, said to taste like crab. Strained and eaten as a bouillon, it was served with slices of veal liver or dove breasts and croutons.
Instead of eating adult cockchafers, children have for over two millennia used them as a seasonal toy. A long piece of thread was tied to one of its legs, which the child held while the beetle was thrown into the air, making it into a sort of kite. As the cockchafer tried to escape, its flight pattern made a pleasing spiral shape.
Cockchafer populations plummeted in the mid-20th century thanks to the industrial scale usage of agricultural pesticides, but since restrictions were imposed, numbers are slowly recovering. The cockchafer, with its loud buzzing and that eerie thud on the window, is once more becoming feature of our late Spring evening soundscape.
