- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Honey bees are the first thing you notice about the sea squill (Drimiamaritima or Urginea maritima) in the 100-acre UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden.
The sea squill, thriving in the Carolee Shields White Flower Garden and Gazebo, is a bee magnet, not to mention it's an incredible flowering plant in an incredible place.
As it says on the Arboretum website: "The Carolee Shields White Flower Garden and Gazebo is a theme garden based on medieval moon-viewing gardens of India and Japan. With its curving paths framing a vine-covered gazebo, the garden is a popular site for weddings and other events. Many of the plants here are fragrant, and their pale flowers are particularly luminous by moonlight. The garden is named for Carolee Shields, an avid gardener and the wife of Judge Peter J. Shields, one of the founders of the UC Davis campus."
The plant grows from a large bulb that produces a raceme of flowers. It's native to southern Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa. Since ancient times, it's been used as a medicinal plant. Hippocrates reportedly used it to treat jaundice, convulsions, and asthma. The main active compounds, according to Wikipedia, are cardiac glycosides.
And did you know that the plant has also been used as a poison? "It is very bitter, so most animals avoid it," Wikipedia tells us. "Rats, however, eat it readily, and then succumb to the toxic scilliroside. This has made the plant a popular rodenticide for nearly as long as it has been in use as a medicine. The bulbs are dried and cut into chips, which can then be powdered and mixed with rat bait. The plant was introduced as an experimental agricultural crop in the 20th century primarily to develop high-toxicity varieties for use as rat poison.]nterest continued to develop as rats became resistant to coumarin-based poison."
Who knew?
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Since Sept. 1, 2020, we've reared and released 28 healthy monarch butterflies into the Vacaville, Calif., area.
Each eclosed from its chrysalis, dried its wings, and fluttered around its indoor habitat (a netted, zipped, pop-up container available at the Bohart Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Davis and online).
Then each alerted us that it's time to leave.
Let me out! Now!
The entire process, from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to adult, is not only breathtaking but phenomenal. Each time is special. Each time is unique.
Over the last four years, our little project has involved a little over 100 caterpillars (total) reared to adulthood, but this year, the COVID-19 Year, we reared them mostly from eggs. We collected the eggs before their predators (spiders, milkweed bugs, lady beetles, green lacewings, et al) sought out a meal. We collected the larvae or caterpillars before the wasps, tachnid flies, praying mantids and birds eyed them.
So, there they were, the Magical 28, and there they went, the Magical 28.
Their entrance into a world unknown (seven different Freedom Days) varied:
- Some edged out of their habitat container as if confused about what to do next
- Some bolted out as if a California scrub jay were chasing them
- Several touched down on flowers, such as the UC Davis yellow roses, "Sparkle and Shine," and the Mexican sunflowers (Tithonia rotundifola)
- Several fluttered into the crape myrtle tree
- One hugged a fence post
- One decided to become an integral part of our garden sculpture, the Ray Carrington railroad tie sculpture. (Emeritus entomologist Walter Bentley, UC Cooperative Extension farm advisor and UC Integrated Pest Management advisor, called it "The Iron Butterfly.")
As of today, the Magical 28 are gone, but their buddies are waiting in the wings. Nine chrysalids remain. The Magical 9?
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Happy Labor Day!
And what an appropriate time to post an image of a Gulf Fritillary, Agraulis vanillae, depositing an egg!
The females lay their eggs on the tendrils and leaves of the butterfly's host plant, the passionflower vine (Passiflora) but we've seen them depositing eggs on nearby fences where the vines climb.
Butterfly guru Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology, says the Gulf Frit was introduced into southern California in the 19th century, in the vicinity of San Diego in the 1870s. It was first recorded in the Bay Area before 1908. "It became a persistent breeding resident in the East and South Bay in the 1950s and has been there since." Once prevalent in the Sacramento area in the 1960s, it "seems to have died out by the early 1970s," he said. Then in 2009, it began making a comeback in the Sacramento area."
It is a dazzling butterfly, what with its brilliant orange wings and spectacular silver-spangled underwings.
The Gulf Frit, also called the "passion butterfly," is usually quite skittish--except this one wasn't. We captured this image on Labor Day weekend in Vacaville, Calif., with a short macro lens--60mm--mounted on a Nikon D500.
She didn't seem to mind.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
UC Davis alumnus and bee expert Elizabeth Frost, a technical specialist for bees with the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, sadly knows the fire scene well.
Frost, a 13-year beekeeper, recently authored "24 Million Acres: Reports from Australia's Massive Fire Scar," published in the quarterly magazine, 2 Million Blossoms. The informative piece tackles the subject of Australian bushfires and it provides insight into the kind of scorched path lying ahead for California beekeepers.
"Bees don't abscond but stay with the hives as far as I can tell from beekeeper anecdotal evidence," Frost told us this week. "Where a 'cool' burn runs quickly through the bee yard, hives generally suffer from radiant heat. Post-fire, they should should be fed supplementally if there are no natural food sources where they can be moved to, and requeened. Otherwise, ongoing queen/productivity issues result."
At UC Davis, Frost worked with bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey (now at Washington State University) at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility. The two colleagues are closely following the California wildfire disaster. "This is devastating--it will take years to recover," Cobey said.
An integral part of what's occurring both here and Australia, the colleagues said, is climate change. "Prolonged and potentially extreme bushfire seasons in Australia due to climate change is our present reality, not our future," wrote Frost in 2 Million Blossoms.
Meanwhile, the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council is keying on rebuilding the bushfire-devastated honey bee and pollination industry.
Frost described the 2019-20 bush fires in 2 Million Blossoms: "24 million acres were burnt in Australia's 2019-2020 bushfire season. In Australia's biggest beekeeping state, New South Wales (NSW), the 2019-20 bush-fires burnt through 13 million acres, 7% of the state's area, including 37% of NSW National Parks and 50% of State forests. NSW Apiarists' Association President Stephen Targett noted, “NSW Bushfires have burnt over 9,809 hives and wiped out the field of over 88,094 hives and burnt just over 5 million hectares of forests. With minimal autumn prospects, a small percentage of these affected hives will be suitable for almond pollination. While the mature almond orchards in Australia don't cover anywhere near as much land as in the United States, they still require around 220,000 hives in August, when mass bloom occurs in the Southern Hemisphere."
"This bushfire disaster was unprecedented in its impact on the Australian beekeeping industry which relies on native tall timber forests of nectar and pollen yielding trees to produce 30,000 tons of honey in a good year," Frost wrote. "Most of these species flower once every 3 to 4 years, unless soil moisture is below average for extended periods in which case some trees may not flower for up to 10 years. Australia's unique flora and dispersed bloom times means beekeepers must pay keen attention to botanical detail in order to effectively migrate to nectar flows that are not annual or even biannual. Australia lost vast swathes of vital natural sources of nutrition, species that provide car- bohydrates, proteins, amino and fatty acids, vitamins, and minerals. The bushfires destroyed prime habitat that functioned as a safe haven far from the threat of pesticides to honey bees and native pollinators alike."
Frost called attention to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), a leading Australian federal government scientific agency, that has been conducting bushfire research for almost 70 years. "Bushfires are a natural part of the Australian landscape, necessary for the regeneration of many endemic plant species that evolved with the harsh climatic conditions of the world's lowest, flattest and (apart from Antarctica) driest continents," Frost pointed out. CSIRO reports that “bushfires are the result of a combination of weather and vegetation (which acts as a fuel for the fire), together with a way for the fire to begin – most commonly due to a lightning strike and sometimes human-influences (mostly accidental such as the use of machinery which produces a spark).”
The impact of climate change has led to longer, more intense fire seasons, Frost related, and an increase in the average number of elevated fire weather days, as measured by the Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI). Last year saw the highest annual accumulated FFDI on record.
"Climate change doesn't cause fires directly, but has caused an increase in the occurrence of extreme fire weather and in the length of the fire season across large parts of Australia since the 1950s," Frost wrote. "In addition to 2019 being the driest year since records began in 1900, it was Australia's warmest year. In 2019 the annual mean temperature was 1.52 °C above average.”
Frost asked: "In the short term, how will the beekeeping industry evolve to cope with millions of acres of its floral resource burnt and unproductive, providing no bee forage for at least the next few years? Supplemental feeding, previously practiced sparingly in Australia, will have to become the norm for the country if beekeepers hope to bring colonies up to required colony strength as agreed in their almond pollination contracts."
Sadly, it's a long singed recovery as well for the California beekeepers victimized by the wildfires. (To offer financial support for Caroline Yelle, owner of Pope Canyon Queens, access the Gofundme account.)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Ever seen a cuckoo bee?
They're also called parasitic bees or "kleptoparasites" or "cleptoparasitises."
They cannot carry pollen (no apparatus) and do not construct their nests. They lay their eggs in the nests of their hosts and then eat the food meant for the hosts. Or as the late Robbin Thorp, distinguished emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis, told us: "They eat the provisions, a pollen ball meant for the host offspring, and kill and eat the host larvae."
We've been watching a cuckoo bee, Xeromelecta californica, a parasite of the digger bee, Anthophora, as it forages on the African blue basil.
We've also been watching Anthophora urbana foraging on the basil. When the female leaves her nest to gather more food, the cuckoo bee takes the opportunity to lay an egg in her nest.
Sneaky, aren't they?
Very.