last few days I have seen several small beetles scampering to hide when I have opened the door on our little 2nd house.
Kicking the door made loads drop to the floor, which I quickly stamped on and killed.
Today, just a couple dropped out and, this time, I was prepared with a jar, caught this one.
@Rob_le_Pest are you able to help me, please?
Surely there’s no need to kill them? Can’t you just sweep them up into a dustpan and chuck them out?
I’m presuming they are some sort of woodworm beetle as they come from inside the wood of the door… and such insects are given no quarter in our properties…
If I find they are benign - all well and good.
Is that a Capricorn?
How big is it?
Definitely need some idea of scale - but it looks like it could be one of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylotrupes.
1cm long not counting the feelers out front…
Hylotroupe a strong contender then.
Capricorne ?
They are much bigger than a cm aren’t they?
Are much bigger, there are different sorts and the biggest is protected.
Not against Stella it’s not 
Good point. I was thinking of the petit capricorne, but even that is fairly big !
Looking more closely at the head shape makes me think of “punaise” type beetle (Calocoris biclavatus, Reduvius personatus, that kind of thing)
When it dies I can take a photo… currently moving too quickly and trying to get out of the jar.
We’ve taken the door off and cleared all debris out of the cavity at the bottom.
No more insects appear to be around, so perhaps the problem is solved.
My wife and me would seem to be becoming almost Jain like in our attitudes to other life forms. We try to avoid killing anything. We haven’t started wearing veils and sweeping the ground in front of us yet though.
Hi… The insect in your picture looks to me like it could possibly be a Grillon des Bois (wood cricket). We have had regular instances of them coming in from the garden into the house (in the Jura)… escaping conditions outside. Our local neighbours confirm the same experience, and that they are harmless. They appear to be very slow moving, but occasionally do jump, so we have even found them upstairs and in the bath. It can take some weeks for them to die if trapped in a jar. We pick them up and return them outside. Ours tend to be quite dark brown/black and about an inch or more long, with a distinctive rounded bullet like head.
see for example http://www.atelier-nature-hirondelles.fr/la-foret/grillon-des-bois/
and a picture of one in our porch on the tiles
Hi John… no, we have crickets too in the meadows and gardens… this beetle is from a family of wood-eaters… 
we do put as many “visitors” outside as we possibly can, safe and sound.
Stella’s picture is very different to yours - different shaped head, no cerci (the little “tails” on the cricket), legs more-or-less even in size unlike the cricket with it’s long, powerful back legs, and no barbs on the legs of Stella’s mystery insect either.
