- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
You don't hear those two words often, but you'll hear them often from Amy Toth, who's hoping that the hashtag, #wasplove, will draw attention to the wonderful world of wasps.
Toth, known for her work on bee and wasp behavior,genomics, and evolution, is an assistant professor--and outspoken wasp lover--from the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, Ames.
She delivered a presentation on honey bees at the UC Davis Bee Symposium on May 9. Then on May 13, she discussed her research on wasps at a UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology seminar.
The Bee Symposium showcased a "lot of bee love," and she's hoping that the same love will apply to wasps.
Indeed, folks verbally attack these social insects daily on social media. "I hate them," they say. "What good are they?" To be honest, I've witnessed European paper wasps (Polistes dominula) attacking crippled Gulf Fritillary butterflies in our bee garden, and dismembering and carrying off bits of Gulf Frit caterpillars to feed their colony. Wasps are carnivores. Honey bees are vegetarians.
So, we asked Amy Toth to list what she loves about wasps.
She eagerly obliged!
1. They are pollinators
2. They contribute to biocontrol of lepidopteran pests in gardens and on decorative plants
3. They have been shown to carry yeasts to winemaking grapes that may be important contributors to the fermentation process and wonderful flavors in wine!
4. They are the only known insect (Polistes fuscatus) that can recognize each other as individuals by their faces.
5. They are devoted mothers that will dote on their young all day long for weeks, defending their families with fury.
6. Their social behavior, in my opinion, is the most human-like of any insect. They know each other as individuals, and are great cooperators overall, but there is an undercurrent of selfishness to their behavior, manifest in nearly constant passive-aggressive interactions between individuals.
7. They are artists. They make perfect hexagonal nest cells out of paper, which they make themselves out of tree bark + saliva.
8. They are extremely intelligent. They're predators, architects, good navigators, and great learners. Among insects, they have large brains, especially the mushroom bodies (learning/memory and cognition area of insect brain).
9. They are beautiful, complex, and fascinating creatures!
That's Amy Toth's amazing #wasplove list.
I'd like to add No. 10: They are extremely photogenic.
#wasplove! Think it will catch on?
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Forget about “fun and games.” Think “fun and names.”
The open house at the Bohart Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Davis, last Sunday afternoon focused on the theme, "Name That Bug! How About Bob?"
One of the activities involved matching a photo of a celebrity or well-known person with the genuine name of an insect.
Harrison Ford has an ant named for him: Pheidole harrisonfordi.
Someone named an Australian horse fly after singer Beyonce. It's Scaptia beyonceae
Bill Gates? Eristalis gatesi, a Costa Rican flower fly.
Charlie Chaplin is immortalized with in an insect named Campsicnemius charliechaplini, a long-legged fly.
Greta Garbo is a solitary wasp: Rostropria garbo.
Then there's the slime mold beetle that someone opted to name Agathidium bushi, for former President George W. Bush, the 43rd president. (That one proved quite controversial.)
The Bohart Museum sponsors a nonprofit biolegacy program, an opportunity to name an insect after yourself or a loved one. This is a lasting dedication and will help support future research and discovery at the Bohart, said Lynn Kimsey, museum director and a professor of entomology at UC Davis.
For example, there's a new wasp species named Lanthanomyia bockleri or “The Bockler Wasp,” thanks to a concerted drive to memorialize award-winning biology teacher Donald “Doc Boc” Bockler of Arlington (Mass.) High School. Two of his former students from the Class of 1993--Tabatha Bruce Yang of the Bohart Museum and Margaret Dredge Moore of Arlington--launched the fundraising drive to name an insect after him. Senior museum scientist Heydon published his work on Lanthanomyia bockleri Heydon in Zootaxa, a worldwide mega-journal for zoological taxonomists and the name is now official. (For more information, and to get a list of species available for naming, contact bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.)
The Sunday crowd enjoyed meeting scientists from the Bohart Museum and the California Department of Food and Agriculture. They talked about names and admired the insect specimens and held the critters in the live "petting zoo." The pets? Rose-haired tarantulas, walking sticks and Madagascar hissing cockroaches.
The Bohart Museum, founded by UC Davis entomologist Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007), houses a global collection of nearly eight million specimens. It is also the home of the seventh largest insect collection in North America, and the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of the insect biodiversity. The museum's regular hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. The facility is closed to the public on Fridays and on major holidays. Admission is free. Open houses, focusing on specific themes, are held on weekends throughout the academic year.
The last open house of the year is "Moth Night," set from 8 to 11 p.m., Saturday, July 18 on the Bohart Museum grounds. Participants will learn how to collect moths and identify them.
More information on the Bohart Museum is available by contacting Tabatha Yang, education and public outreach coordinator at (530) 752-0493 or tabyang@ucdavis.edu.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
I've been waiting for a decade to see a male Valley carpenter bee (Xylocopa varipuncta) foraging in our family bee garden.
The girls? Oh, yes. We see them every day. Sometimes half a dozen at a time. They're usually on the salvia or passionflower vine.
The boys? No. They do not go where our girls are. I saw a solo fly-by a couple of years ago, but he did not stop.
Then last Saturday, a male Valley carpenter bee dropped down and nectared on the foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea), the dwarf bulbine (Bulbine frutescens), the catmint (Nepeta) and the blanket flower (Gaillardia x grandiflora).
In that order.
To be honest, a very territorial European male carder bee (Anthidium manicatum) chased him off the foxgloves, so our big boy headed for the catmint and then the blanket flower, where he encountered only docile honey bees.
The male Xylocopa varipuncta is the insect that results in so many similar calls--"I found a golden bumble bee! Is it a new species?" A bumble bee it is not. A carpenter bee it is.
Native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, distinguished emeritus professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, calls the male Valley carpenter bees "teddy bears." That's because they're green-eyed, blond and fuzzy-wuzzy. Thorp reminds curious kids and apprehensive adults that "boy bees can't sting."
Thorp often displays a female Valley carpenter bee (solid black) alongside the blond male to show the sexual dimorphism, or what Wikipedia explains is a phenotypic differentiation between males and females of the same species.
The Boy Wonder is sort of like a blond Marilyn Monroe male courting a Clarkette Gable.
What happened when the Boy Wonder left the blanket flower? He returned to the foxgloves.
Just briefly. Until the wool carder bee targeted him again.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
You will if you attend the Spring Festival hosted at the Loma Vista Farm, part of the Vallejo City Unified School District, on Saturday, May 16. Offering free admission, the festival will take place from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 150 Rainier Ave., Vallejo.
The bumble bee nest? It's the home of a colony of yellow-faced bumble bees, Bombus vosnesenskii, a native bee species commonly found on the west coast of North America, from Baja California to Canada.
Rita LeRoy discovered the entomological prize. She's the "Farm Keeper"--that's her official title--at the Loma Vista Farm. "I've worked for the Vallejo school district at Loma Vista Farm for 25 years," she related. "I teach students about nature and nutrition through hands on farm lessons involving cooking, gardening, insect appreciation, and animal care."
The nest is currently roped off, just waiting for two-legged folks to admire and appreciate it. It's a marvel of nature, for sure.
More on the Loma Vista Farm? Founded in 1974, it's a 5-acre outdoor classroom that provides hands-on educational activities involving plants and animals for children of all ages and abilities, according to its website. "We seek to increase students' knowledge of nature and nutrition while enhancing academic learning, ecoliteracy, and psychosocial development."
The farm offers field trips, after-school opportunities through 4-H, community service and volunteer opportunities, garden-based workshops for adults, and job training for college students, developmentally disabled young adults, and disadvantaged youth.
We first visited the Loma Vista Farm back in the 1980s as part of a 4-H activity. It was--and is--a delightful place to be. (And bees think so, too!)
Loma Vista Farm is open to the public Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. during the school year. It is closed on holidays and follows the Vallejo school district calendar.
And the Spring Festival? It's an opportunity for friends and families to visit the farm and participate in crafts and activities. Activities include educational information booths, animal adventures, train rides and greenhouse tours. Download flier.
In the meantime, check out the red pollen load of Bombus vosnesenskii (at left). We saw the bumble bee foraging on vetch last weekend at the Hastings Preserve, Carmel, a biological field station operated by the University of California. The Hastings Preserve was the site of a BugShot macro photography workshop taught by acclaimed insect photographers Alex Wild, John Abbott and Thomas Shahan.
And for more information on bumble bees, be sure to read the book, Bumble Bees of North America: An Identification Guide (Princeton Press), co-authored by one of our own, Robbin Thorp, native pollinator specialist and distinguished emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis. Lead author is Paul H. Williams, and co-authors are Leif Richardson and Sheila Colla.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Varma's time-lapse video of 2500 images vividly shows the development of eggs to pupae to adults. He captured the video at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, University of California, Davis. Varma's images of a bee in flight, and a close-up of an emerging worker bee are also from the Laidlaw apiary.
Those are our girls!
Indeed, our bees from the Laidlaw facility figured quite prominently in the piece, “Quest for a Superbee,” published in the May edition of National Geographic.
Staff research associate/beekeeper Billy Synk worked with and assisted photographer Varma for about a year. Extension apiculturist emeritus Eric Mussen, who retired last June after 38 years of service, served as a research fact-checker. National Geographic contacted him for data confirmation.
The article, authored by Charles Mann, questions “Can the world's most important pollinators be saved?' and ponders “how scientists and breeders are trying to create a hardier honeybee.”
In his article, Mann explores what it would take to build a better bee. He touches on RNAi and quotes bee researcher Marla Spivak of the University of Minnesota and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” as saying “If you target one specific area, the organism will always make an end run around it.” She advocates a “healthier, stronger” bee, or what Mann writes as “one that can fight (varroa) mites and disease on its own, without human assistance.”
Spivak was the keynote speaker at the Bee Symposium, hosted May 9 by the Honey and Pollination Center in the UC Davis Conference Center. It drew a crowd of 360. (Soon we'll post video from the symposium.)
Spivak and John Harbo of the USDA's research center in Baton Rouge, La. “both succeeded in breeding versions of hygienic bees by the late 1990s,” Mann writes. “A few years after that, scientists realized that hygienic bees are less effective as the mites grow more numerous.”
Both Spivak and Varma have presented TED talks on honey bees.
Spivak: Why Bees Are Disappearing
Varma: A Thrilling Look at the First 21 Days of a Bee's Life
Both of the TED talks should be required viewing for anyone who wants to know more about bees and their needs. Maybe these TED talks should be TEB talks--Take Every Bee Seriously.
