Spring doesn't "spring" on the University of California, Davis campus. Sometimes it skitters, scampers and scoots. That's in between the cool and warm temperatures that deceive us--and the bees.

Actually, spring won't punch the clock until March 20, but if you stroll around the central campus, you'll see honey bees nectaring on almond, rosemary, and tidy tip blossoms.

And over at the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center, director Amina Harris is gearing up for the fourth annual UC Davis UC Davis Bee Symposium: Keeping Bees Healthy, set Saturday, March 3 in the UC Davis Conference Room on Alumni Drive.

The all-day event "is designed for beekeepers of all experience levels, including gardeners, farmers and anyone interested in the world of pollination and bees," Harris says. "In addition to our speakers, there will be lobby displays featuring graduate student research posters, the latest in beekeeping equipment, books, honey, plants, and much more."

The event is sponsored by the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center (located in the Robert Mondavi Institute of Wine and Food Science), and the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

Keynote speaker is noted bee scientist/professor/author Tom Seeley of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., who will speak on "Darwinian Beekeeping." Seeley is the Horace White Professor in Biology, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, where he teaches courses on animal behavior and researches the behavior and social life of honey bees. He's the author of Honeybee Ecology: A Study of Adaptation in Social Life (1985), The Wisdom of the Hive: the Social Physiology of Honey Bee Colonies (1995), and Honeybee Democracy (2010), all published by Princeton University Press. His books will be available for purchase and signing at the symposium.

A pending deadline: Graduate students throughout the country are invited to submit their research posters. The winners will share $1800 in cash prizes. Applications must be submitted to Liz Luu at luu@caes.ucdavis.edu, by Feb. 12. For the rules, see this web page.

The conference begins at 8:30 a.m. with registration and a continental breakfast. At 9 a.m., Amina Harris and Neal Williams, UC Davis professor of entomology and the center's faculty co-director will welcome the crowd and introduce Seeley, who speaks at 9:15 a.m.  Then a host of speakers will address and interact with the crowd throughout the day.  To check out the agenda and to register, access this page.  Or contact Harris at aharris@ucdavis.edu or Liz Luu at luu@caes.ucdavis.edu for more information. Registration is $85 (general) and $25 for students.

The symposium ends at 4:45, when the crowd heads to the reception in the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, a bee demonstration garden located next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road, west of the central campus.

It's all about the bees-our littlest agricultural workers--and keeping them healthy.  

“To Boldy Go.”

UC Davis Chancellor Gary May, a Star Trek enthusiast, coined that theme last year when he launched the university's 10-year strategic planning process. It's aimed at bringing together everyone's bold ideas to “propel us to accomplish things we've only dreamed of in the past.”

So does the chancellor “boldy go” into a museum with nearly eight million insect specimens and a live “petting zoo” of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking insects, scorpions, tarantulas and praying mantises?

Does he "boldly go" to see a rose-haired tarantula named Coco McFluffin, a scorpion named Hamilton, and an orchid praying mantis named Marsha? And dozens of Madagascar hissing cockroaches fondly nicknamed “Hissers?”

He does. Of course, he does!

On Tuesday afternoon, Chancellor May and Helene Dillard, dean of the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences--accompanied by a small contingent--toured the research-and-education-oriented Bohart Museum of Entomology in the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane.

May, an accomplished scholar/engineer/administrator and former dean of Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Engineering, became the seventh UC Davis chancellor on Aug. 1, 2017. Known as a dynamic and innovative leader, the chancellor today leads “the most comprehensive campus in the University of California system, with four colleges and six professional schools that offer 104 undergraduate majors and 96 graduate and professional degrees. UC Davis enrolls about 37,000 students, brings in nearly $800 million annually in sponsored research and contributes at least $8 billion to the California economy each year,” according to the UC Davis News Service.

This was his first official visit to the Bohart Museum, a world-renowned museum that's part of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. Those welcoming the UC Davis administrators included Bohart Museum director Lynn Kimsey, UC Davis professor of entomology; Steve Nadler, chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology; senior museum scientist Steve Heydon; Tabatha Yang, the museum's education and outreach coordinator; and Jeff Smith, curator of the butterfly and moth collection.

The Bohart Museum traces its roots back to 1946 in Briggs Hall, where it began as a teaching-and-research tool--and began humbly, Kimsey told the entourage. It consisted of two Schmitt boxes but grew steadily with the help of several faculty members, students and donors. By 1969 the number of specimens had totaled more than 100,000. Today the global collection houses nearly eight million specimens.

The museum is named for its founder, celebrated entomologist Richard Mitchell Bohart (1913-2007), whose UC Davis career spanned more than 50 years.   He established the research-oriented collection in 1946--the same year he joined the UC Davis faculty--and contributed scores of specimens: Hymenoptera (bees, wasps and ants), Diptera (flies) and Strepsiptera (twisted wing parasites). He chaired the Department of Entomology from 1963 to 1976. He later served as major professor to a young entomology graduate student named Lynn Kimsey, eager to study the taxonomy of bees and wasps and insect diversity.  Kimsey, who received her doctorate in 1979, joined the UC Davis faculty in 1989, the same year she was named director of the collection. Like her mentor, she has also chaired the department (2008-2009).

Although the Bohart Museum is research-oriented,  an important part is the education and outreach program, Kimsey pointed out. A display board crafted by Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator, showed that in the 2016-2017 academic year, the museum tallied 1500 walk-in visitors; 13 off-site events drawing 4,050 people, 60 classroom visits serving 1,562 students; 122 guided tours serving 2,403, and museum events, including UC Davis Picnic Day and Museum Biodiversity Day, 7,915 visitors.

As they walked around the insect museum, Chancellor May and Dean Hillard admired trays of butterflies; watched students working on specimens; thumbed through a macro insect photography book by Levon Biss of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, England; and greeted the permanent and temporary residents of the petting zoo. Madagascar hissing cockroaches and walking sticks (stick insects) adorned the shoulders of UC Davis entomology student Wade Spencer, "zookeeper" of the petting zoo. He also cradled his favorite scorpion named Hamilton. Explaining that scorpions fluoresce under ultraviolet light, Kimsey illuminated Hamilton.  The arachnid glowed a blue-green neon; the glow comes from a substance in the hyaline layer, part of the scorpion's exoskeleton, they explained.

UC Davis entomology student and Entomology Club secretary Lohit Garikipati, who rears praying mantises, displayed part of his collection, including Martha, an adult orchid mantis, Hymenopus coronatus. Martha? "Her sister is Mallow, since they are both the color of toasted marshmallows," he related.  Orchid mantises are endemic to Southeast Asia.

Children who visit the Bohart Museum delight in the petting zoo, Kimsey said.  Among the 2017 visitors: public and private school students; Girl and Boy Scouts; 4-H'ers; and youngsters from the Tulare County Office of Education's Migrant Education Program. Following their visit, most of the Tulare group, ages 8-11, vowed to become entomologists.

"All the kids are told when they come in that there are three words they are not allowed to use here," Kimsey said. "They are yuck, eww and gross."

 But, she quipped, "they can say frass." 

Frass is insect excrement.

(Editor's Note: The Bohart Museum is open to the public Monday through Thursdays, 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m., and also holds weekend open houses periodically during the academic year. Admission is free. The Bohart will be open on Saturday, Feb. 17 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. as part of the campuswide (and free) Biodiversity Museum Day, featuring 13 museums or collections.)

The bumble bee was hungry.

She moved quickly from blossom to blossom on a jade plant at the Benicia (Calif.) Capitol State Historic Park, Solano County. As she foraged, you could see her tongue (proboscis) and her trademark yellow face and yellow stripe on her abdomen.

Bombus vosnesenskii, the yellow-faced bumble bee. And what a treat to see her in January.

It's enough to make you want to plant jade (Crassula ovata), also known as the friendship plant and lucky plant. It's native to South Africa and Mozambique, but is cultivated worldwide.

Another jade--jewelry--is considered lucky, too. It's supposed to bring you good luck and protect you from evil, according to Chinese tradition.

For bumble bee enthusiasts, just seeing a bumble bee on the plant is luck enough.

If you want to learn more about bumble bees, be sure to pick up a copy of the award-winning Bumble Bees of North America: An identification Guide (Princeton University Press, 2014). Lead author is Paul H. Williams, a research entomologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Co-authors are Robbin Thorp, distinguished emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis;   Leif L. Richardson,  then a doctoral candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Dartmouth College; and Sheila R. Colla, then a postdoctoral fellow at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and a project leader at Wildlife Preservation Canada. Of the 250 species of Bombus worldwide, some 46 bumble bee species are found in North America.  You can read about "evolutionary relationships, geographical distributions and ecological roles." 

Bumble bees will also find their way into a presentation by world-class garden designer, pollinator advocate and author Kate Frey of Hopland, Calif., at the fourth annual UC Davis Bee Symposium: Keeping Bees Healthy, set Saturday, March 3 in the UC Davis Conference Room on Alumni Drive. She'll speak on "Designing Bee-Friendly Gardens" at 2:45 p.m. Frey is co-author of The Bee-Friendly Garden (with Gretchen LeBuhn, professor of biology, San Francisco State University). The book won the American Horticultural Society 2017 Book Award.

Registration is underway for the conference, sponsored by the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center, located in the Robert Mondavi Institute of Wine and Food Science, and the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

Keynote speaker is noted bee scientist/professor/author Tom Seeley of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., who will speak on "Darwinian Beekeeping" at 9:15 a.m. Seeley is the Horace White Professor in Biology, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, where he teaches courses on animal behavior and researches the behavior and social life of honey bees. He's the author of Honeybee Ecology: A Study of Adaptation in Social Life (1985), The Wisdom of the Hive: the Social Physiology of Honey Bee Colonies (1995), and Honeybee Democracy (2010), all published by Princeton University Press. His books will be available for purchase and signing at the symposium.

The daylong event "is designed for beekeepers of all experience levels, including gardeners, farmers and anyone interested in the world of pollination and bees," said Amina Harris, director of the Honey and Pollination Center. "In addition to our speakers, there will be lobby displays featuring graduate student research posters, the latest in beekeeping equipment, books, honey, plants, and much more."

Graduate students throughout the country are invited to submit their research posters. The winners will share $1800 in cash prizes. Applications must be submitted to Liz Luu at luu@caes.ucdavis.edu, by Feb. 12. For the rules, see this web page.

To register, access the Honey and Pollination Center website. The cost is $85 (general), $25 (students). For more information, contact Amina Harris at aharris@ucdavis.edu or Liz Luu at luu@caes.ucdavis.edu.

Well, it did what it was supposed to do.

It walked.

When Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and UC Davis professor of entomology, glanced at a wall near the entrance of the Bohart Museum during a recent open house, she noticed something that wasn't part of the wall.

A stick insect, aka walking stick.

An escapee from the Bohart's live "petting zoo."

And it was doing what stick insects (Phasmatodea) do--it was molting.

“It should be finished by now,” Kimsey said, periodically keeping an eye on its progress.

"Twiggy" is now back in the petting zoo, awaiting the arrival of visitors to the Bohart Museum during the seventh annual UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 17, when the public can explore the diversity of life at 13 museums and/or collections. For free. Times will vary from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. or from noon to 4 p.m. The Bohart, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane and the home of nearly eight million insect specimens, will be open from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. (See more information on Biodiversity Day.)

Like all insects, stick insects have a head, thorax and abdomen and six legs. Their elongated bodies mimic a stick or straw. These "bug sticks" don't move fast (is that why they're calling "walking sticks" instead of "running sticks?"), but what a perfect camouflage from predators!

Entomologists tell us that before reaching the adult stage, a stick insect may shed its skin six to nine times, depending on the species and the gender. Its outer skeleton (skin) prevents it from growing so it sheds its skin to do so.

Stick insects are a favorite at the Bohart Museum petting zoo, which also includes Madagascar hissing cockroaches, praying mantises, and tarantulas. Visitors love to hold the sticks and photograph them. They can also purchase stick insect T-shirts in the Bohart Museum's year-around gift shop.

Ever see a stick insect molting? Here's a You Tube channel that depicts the process perfectly. You can also learn about them in this Fascinating Facts About Stick Insects.

A few facts from Wikipedia:

• The genus Phobaeticus includes the world's longest insects and can reach 12 inches long.
• Many species have a secondary line of defense in the form of startle displays, spines or toxic secretions
• Phasmatodea can be found all over the world except for the Antarctic and Patagonia.
• They are most numerous in the tropics and subtropics; the greatest diversity is found in Southeast Asia and South America, followed by Australia, Central America, and the southern United States.
• The island of Borneo has more species of Phasmatodea than any other place in the world: The count: 300 species.
• Many species of phasmids are parthenogenic, meaning the females lay eggs without needing to mate with males to produce offspring.