On Sunday 11th May, despite the regular and sometimes heavy showers across York, a small but interested group of about a dozen people gathered to hear all about the Tansy Beetle from Dr Geoff Oxford, who with his wife Roma, has been studying them for around twenty years.

The Friends invited Geoff to give the talk at the Pond compound at Rawcliffe Meadows which he estimates holds between 10 and 20 percent of the national Tansy Beetle population.

The talk was fascinating and took us through the beetle’s life cycle, its physical characteristics and differences with beetles it is frequently mistaken for, such as the Mint and Dock Beetle, along with showing the eggs and larvae. Geoff also talked about the annual beetle counts and what they helped reveal about the beetle, and the experiments that he and Roma had carried out to determine key facets of beetle behaviour.

Tansy Beetles paired up

Admiring the Tansy Beetles