Stylish, devilish & sometimes helpful. Meet the Red Legged Ham Beetle.
What has 6 legs, a spiffy blue-green shell and would just as happily eat an Egyptian mummy as dog food, prosciutto – or its own kin?
You guessed it (and honestly, I knew you would); it’s the fantastically named ‘Red Legged Ham Beetle’ (Necrobia rufipes).
A beetle (I hear you say with perhaps less gusto than I’d hoped)… Hold on… why should I care?
Because… This flamboyant yet fearsome beastie is a worldwide pest of dog food, cured meats, and copra, and its insatiable appetite costs the companies who make those things a whole lotta cash. It’s also a predator, a cannibal and a forensic scientist’s best friend.
Never one to be labelled ‘fussy’ in the food department, the ever-adaptable RLHB will also chow down on:
cheese,
bacon and ham,
palm kernel,
meat and bone meal,
dried fish, oh and
late-stage corpses (we’ll get to this later).
Rather than ‘anything with a pulse’, the RLHB prefers anything that the pulse has long since left… and more specifically anything that’s high in protein and fat, with a low water content.
This makes dog kibble the perfect RLHB snack. For double trouble (and maximal manufacturing headache) these beetles like eating both the ingredients that go into dog food, and the finished product as well.
They get into packaging via bag air vents, loose seams and will chew their way through thin cardboard. Once in, they spoil the food by pooing in it, and leaving their cocoons and body parts behind. This all gives the infested product an acrid, bitter smell and taste – which understandably compromises palatability and food safety.
Let’s look at some quick beetle facts so you know what you’re dealing with…
Size: Tiny. They measure in at 3.5-7mm, so think somewhere between a sesame seed and a grain of rice.
Looks: Debonair, bordering on rakish. As the name suggests, RLHBs have bright red legs and antennae, with a rather dapper metallic blue-green body. Honestly this beetle must the envy of other grain pests, who despite their equally excellent names – such as ‘Confused Flour Beetle’, ‘Cigarette Beetle’, and ‘Saw-toothed grain beetle’ – are uniformly brown and lacking panache.
Special features: RLHBs boast strong flying ability (so they can spread easily), and tough mandibles which can chew through leathery hide and even bone. They also possess a ferocious desire to both scavenge old meat and hunt any other bug that also likes to eat old meat. It’s a bug-eat-bug world.
Life cycle: Just a few days after emerging as an adult, RLHB get to work breeding. The female lays her tiny, shiny-white eggs in cracks and grooves, and glues them into place.
These hatch, eat their own eggshells and (taking sibling rivalry to new heights), also eat any other eggs nearby. As larvae, they eat relentlessly (as teenagers are wont to do), and moult 2-3 times. The red-brown larvae hate light and burrow into darkness. Here they vomit up frothy white droplets to make a cocoon and pupate until they re-emerge as adults. Upon emerging and true to form, the now adult RLHBs once again eat any nearby eggs and larvae, and the whole cycle goes around again.
Conditions: RLHB like it hot. They really thrive when it’s summery outside (ideally 30-34°C, but anything north of 22°C will do). Their life cycle is much shorter (approx. 55 days) under these conditions.
Great. So what’s a pet food manufacturer (or stockist) to do? As always, prevention is better than cure. Thoroughly and regularly cleaning cracks and crevasses can help, as can carefully inspecting any incoming material for traces of the beetle. Sticky traps, insect light traps and insecticides can all help. But further research is still underway to help find treatments that do not rely so heavily on fumigants.
So…. Can we get to the mummies and forensics now?
Absolutely! This is where the RLHB’s dietary preferences get interesting. RLHB have been found on Egyptian mummies and lots of other mummified remains besides (eg. in the crypts of Palermo and in mummified remains in Malaysia), because remember, they love dried-out meat. As scavengers as well as predators, they happily eat from both the late-stage corpse and the other critters that come to eat it too, especially maggots. RLHBs are never the first insects on the scene, but arrive much later in the decomposition process.
There’s an unexpected upside to the predictability of this. Forensic entomologists look to the humble RLHB as an indicator species, to help figure out the amount of time that has elapsed since the corpse they’re looking at died.
Which just goes to show, this dashingly attired little cannibalistic, scavenger-cum-predator can both leave food and pet food manufacturers wringing their hands, but can prove helpful to forensic scientists. Two sides of the same coin, and in my view at least, intriguing!
Words and pictures by Amanda Sun.
© Amanda Sun 2026. All rights reserved.
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If you’d like to delve deeper, here are my sources.
Baumjohann, K. & Benecke, M. (2019) ‘Insect traces and the mummies of Palermo – a status report’, Entomologie heute, 31, pp. 73–93. Available at: https://home.benecke.com/publications/insect-traces-and-the-mummies-of-palermo-a-status-report (Accessed: 11 August 2026).
dos Santos, A.T. and Bicho, C.L. (2024) ‘Biological characterization and life cycle of Necrobia rufipes (Coleoptera: Cleridae)’, Zoologia, 41, e23007. doi:10.1590/S1984-4689.v41.e23007.
Holcomb, M. (2006) ‘[Pest Profile] Biology and Control of the Red-Legged Ham Beetle’, Quality Assurance & Food Safety, 25 October. Available at: https://www.qualityassurancemag.com/article/-pest-profile--biology-and-control-of-the-red-legged-ham-beetle/ (Accessed: 11 August 2026).
Ivorra T, Rahimi R, Zaini NA, Heo CC. Reporting beetles in a mummified human corpse in Malaysia: Necrobia rufipes (Fabricius, 1781) (Coleoptera: Cleridae) and Dermestes maculatus De Geer, 1774 (Coleoptera: Dermestidae). Leg Med (Tokyo). 2023 May;62:102238. doi: 10.1016/j.legalmed.2023.102238. Epub 2023 Mar 8. PMID: 36913819.
Savoldelli S, Jucker C, Peri E, Arif MA, Guarino S. Necrobia rufipes (De Geer) Infestation in Pet Food Packaging and Setup of a Monitoring Trap. Insects. 2020 Sep 11;11(9):623. doi: 10.3390/insects11090623. PMID: 32932792; PMCID: PMC7565875.
Williams, Ian & Scharf, Michael. (2024). Redlegged Ham Beetle, Copra Beetle Necrobia rufipes (De Geer, 1775) (Insecta: Coleoptera: Cleridae: Korynetinae): IN1426/EENY-811, 5/2024. EDIS. 2024. 10.32473/edis-in1426-2024.