Bug Squad

Dianne DiBlasi is frustrated. Shes the advisor of Team B.E.E.S. (Bergen Environmental Effort to Save Bees), a group of six high school students in Allendale, N.J. involved in a honey bee project.

Dear Bee Scientists, wrote 6-year-old Katie Brown of Phoenix, Ariz. I am giving this money to you so you can help the bees. I love the bees. She enclosed $20 from her allowance savings. Hannah Fisher Gray, 11, of Wilmington, Del.

If you meander over to the Bohart Museum of Entomology, UC Davis campus, you'll see a very tiny predator that looks for all the world like a green leaf. It's the Gambian spotted-eye flower mantis and it's one of the many live specimens housed there.

If you've been around honey bee hives much, you know what a smoker is. It's a tool that beekeepers use to inspect, manipulate or handle a hive. They smoke a hive to check the health of the colony, to add a little food, and to take a little honey.

Know your ants. If you want to identify red imported fire ants and other invasive ants found in the Pacific Island region, a newly launched Web site by an entomology graduate student at the University of California, Davis, will help you do just that.