Japanese Beetle Flies around and Digs the Soil to Lay Her Eggs Underground

A putative female Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica, family Scarabaeidae) was found flying low over a gravelled farm road. She was always bad at landing on the ground after a short flight. But she quickly righted herself, walked around, and took off again. The moments of takeoff and awkward landing were replayed at 5x slow-motion (0:38 - 1:43). It turned out that she was looking for a suitable site to lay her eggs underground. Eventually, she began to dig a burrow beside a young grass (unidentified, family Poaceae) and hid herself. She didn’t care and kept digging even when workers of Japanese black ant (Formica japonica, family Formicidae) disturbed her repeatedly. Because the beetle was protected by the hard cuticle, the ant gave up soon and left. The female of Popillia japonica is known to oviposit on a grass root underground. Captured in the sunny midafternoon (around 14:15 PM) of mid-June 2026 in Japan. For a full story (text in Japanese); https://sigma-nature-vlog.blogspot.com/2026/07/blog-post_10.html