Bug Squad

Can you imagine typing a huge grant application on an 132-year-old "type writer?" Make that 986 pages, equal to a four-inch-thick document. No one visiting the Briggs Hall office of UC Davis distinguished professor Bruce Hammock can imagine that, either.

It's Friday Fly Day--and time to post images of a syrphid fly. Syrphid flies, often mistaken for honey bees, are pollinators, too. Also known as flower flies and hover flies, syrphids hover over a flower before touching down.

No contest, no winner, no beer?

You've probably seen California's state insect, the California dogface butterfly, on a first-class stamp, in a book, or on the UC Davis Bohart Museum of Entomology poster.

A winter pollinator garden does not buzz with bees; it crawls with earwigs, ants, roly-polys, and other insects. Turn over a rock, a pot, or a garden sculpture and there they are. Well, there one was. An earwig looked up as we lifted a garden sculpture.