Bug Squad

Sunday, Feb. 8 is a Super Science Day! Visitors to the University of California, Davis campus can visit six museums at the fourth annual Biodiversity Museum Day. It's a week after Super Bowl Sunday, and by then all talk about deflated footballs may have ended.

The Beer-for-a-Butterfly contest is over. And we have a winner! Drum roll...Art Shapiro...

When the week is about butterflies instead of guerrilla attacks, murderous rampages, measles outbreaks, and deflated footballs, it's a good week. Butterflies draw smiles instead of scowls, pleasure instead of pain, glee instead of grief. So, here's Part 1 of the good news.

Where, oh where, is that first bumble bee of the year? It's about this time of the year when the queen black-tailed bumble bee, Bombus melanopygus, and the queen yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii, emerge.

The honey bees are hungry. Those venturing out from their colonies as the temperatures edge toward 55 degrees or more aren't finding much. It's the dead of winter. Spring seems so distant. But wait, the flowering quince is blooming.