Bean Beetle Culture, Living

This little beetle is one of the easiest research specimens to keep. Theyre highly sexually dimorphic allowing even young children to be able to tell male from female, they dont eat as adults, and they only seem to prep their wings but never actually fly. Ive had students use them to answer their own research questions about behavior.

I recently used the bean beetles as part of a research experiment for my senior project. These organisms were very easy to handle, mostly because they did not fly. It was also very easy to tell male from female in this species. There are so many research projects available with these beetles, and they were fun to work with. I highly recommend these to teachers, or students who want to do some scientific investigation that is not too complex, but not as simple as grade-school work.

The cultures can be used to start rearing your own bean beetles or to initiate experiments. All beans carry larvae; they will therefore yield new beetles for the next 1-3 months depending on temperature. The beetles that come with the culture are several days old. At that time, they have already laid almost all of their eggs and cannot be used anymore. So be prepared to having to wait for emerging beetles to start experiments. Pretty much any temp/RH combination will do for rearing purposes. The warmer it gets, the faster they develop. For experiments, keep them as warm as possible, which speeds up development time and decreases variance, for maintenance purposes keep them at room temperature. The bean beetles are perfect for easy experiments in any area you can think of. I had very good results with group projects for my students. Lots of petri dishes and soft tweezers help with experimental setup and manipulation. They take all beans in the genus Vigna, but mung beans are cheapest, which you can get from several vendors. The beetles can be maintained for years with minimal effort. However, I would recommend to simply purchase new cultures when needed, because it takes a long time to obtain enough specimens for experiments from a low-maintanance, low number culture.