The Palo Verde Beetle
Written on May 9, 2026
The palo verde beetle is harmless to people, but it's high up on the repulsive scale. It has to be, otherwise watching my sisters freak out when we were young wouldn't have been something I enjoyed.
Thousands of Palo Verde Beetles
I don't know much about these large beetles, but I'm sure I could find more information than I found on Wikipedia elsewhere. The article says the "grubs" can live underground for as many as three years.
I think it's longer. In the 13 years I lived in my parents' home, I only saw them come out of the ground once. They left holes in the ground about an inch across around most of the trees. Flooding the soil didn't have any effect on them.
The one summer that the beetles came out, they numbered in the thousands. I'm not exaggerating. The funny thing is, we didn't have any palo verde trees anywhere near us. We only had elm, palm and chinaberry trees on our property.
All except one of the elm trees fell over during storms during a period of about 10 years. My father later planted mulberry and spruce trees to replace them. Irrigation from the nearby reservoir was inexpensive.
When the beetles came out, my four brothers and I found whatever we could to swat them out of the sky as they flew past us. We used baseball bats, badminton rackets, and rolled up newspapers.
They only came out at the beginning of dusk, so we didn't have long before it became too dark to see them. I don't know what time of the night the beetles decided to stop flying around.
My four sisters freaked out whenever they saw one of them up close, like the time one decided to park itself on our oak front door. I don't remember which sister it was, but she went around to the back of the house to go inside just to avoid the beetle.
Also, I don't remember which sister had one land on the back of her blouse and hang on, causing her to jump up and down and shriek for more than a minute. Ah, those were the days.
One of Many Fond Memories
That happened in my hometown, sometime before 1974. It's a place I don't want to return to, even though I have two brothers and one sister still living there. Although Phoenix was my home for years before moving to the Philippines, I only return to visit my older son and his family.
The memories of those beetles is something I'll never forget. If I start forgetting, due to old age or something, I'll buy the shirt to remind me. Never mind the fact that the shirt is using the wrong scientific classification for it.
I showed my Filipino daughter-in-law a picture of a beetle and asked her if she knew what it was. She said "salagubang", which means "beetle". Well, duh! I should have asked her what kind of beetle it was to begin with.
Image by Mike Ostrowski, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons