Bug Squad

You've heard of "musical chairs," that anxiety-driven elimination game involving chairs, music and players. When the music stops and a chair is eliminated, the players race for the remaining seats. No one wants to be the first loser.

If there's any flower that should be crowned "Autumn's Majesty," that would be the Mexican sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia), aka "Torch.

"The bee hive is the ultimate home sweet home," Amina Harris, director of the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center, told the crowd at the Western Apicultural Society's 40th annual conference, held in early September at UC Davis. She's right.

Evolutionary ecologist Leslie Saul-Gershenz goes places where many have been but few have ever really seen. Bees and blister beetles, yes.

Friday the 13th is not an unlucky day--not when migratory monarchs make a pit stop at your home on their way to their overwintering sites. Today a male monarch fluttered into our pollinator garden in Vacaville, Calif., and sipped nectar from a tropical milkweed.