Bug Squad

If you're suffering from a sleep disorder, then you'll want to know the kind of research that molecular geneticist Joanna Chiu of the UC Davis Department of Entomology is doing--with fruit flies. The research may one day lead to alleviating your sleep disorder.

If you enjoy climbing the cliffs of Bodega Head on the Sonoma coast, keep your eyes out for bears--wooly bear caterpillars, that is. The so-called "wooly bear caterpillar" is reddish, black and woolly and has a voracious appetite much like that of Joey Chestnut.

Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but the honey bees just kept on working. We recently visited an apiary in Glenn County, and the honey bees were all over the fiddlenecks in patches adjacent to the hives. A springtime scene of golden flowers and buzzing bees. An artist's dream...

It's worth the wait. The two towers of jewels (Echium wildpretti) are blooming in the Hagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, the half-acre bee friendly garden next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, UC Davis. The plant is a biennual and it blooms the second year and that's it.

It's spectacular. It's awe-inspiring. It's a work of art. And it's home to a feral honey bee colony in Vacaville. A Vacaville resident contacted us awhile back about a feral honey bee hive built 30 feet off the ground in a Modesto ash tree.