While we are staying home during the pandemic, insects are most definitely not!
In fact, you may have seen different types of insects swarming over the last few weeks. Swarming is a reproductive behavior where certain insects leave their colonies in droves, mate, disperse, and establish new colonies. Most of these swarms are not successful and end up dying, but for those that are successful, spring is an optimal time for insect colonies to find new homes.
Honey bees are one type of insect that can swarm at this time of the year while looking for new nesting locations. A large number of bees may appear frightening, but most spring swarms of the European honey bee are very docile and unlikely to sting. Our
- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
It's not often that we get to mix baseball and pests in our blog, but today we learned that the San Francisco Giants and Cincinnati Reds game was delayed by almost 20 minutes due to swarming bees.
You can read different takes on this story from the Washington Post, NBC News, and on the Major League Baseball website, and see as one Reds player pretended to spray a pesticide to kill the bees.
In a practical...
- Author: Karey Windbiel-Rojas
In observance of National Pollinator Week, we thought we'd share how you can manage pests around your home, garden, and landscape and still protect pollinators.
Natural enemies (predators, parasites, and pathogens) reduce pest populations and help prevent damage to plants. Pollinators such as domesticated honey bees, wild bees, and other pollinating insects, are essential in the production of many of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts we grow in California, both in our backyards and in commercial agriculture.
Natural enemies and pollinators can be harmed by pesticides...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Will all the pollinators please stand up!
Or do a fly-by like the Blue Angels or a crawl-by like babies competing in a diaper derby.
Bees--there are more than 4000 of them in North America--are the main pollinators, but don't overlook butterflies, beetles, birds, bats and moths.
And flies.
Flies?
Yes, flies.
Hover flies, aka flower flies or syrphid flies, belong to the family Syrphidae. Scientists estimate that worldwide, there are about 6000 described species in 200 genera. As their name implies, hover flies "hover," sort of like a helicopter preparing to...
- Author: Andrew M. Sutherland
[From March 2014 issue of the Retail Nursery and Garden Center IPM News.]
A massive killing of bumblebees in Oregon, concerns about impacts on honey bees, and tight new regulations imposed by the European Union have kept neonicotinoid insecticides in the news. The neonicotinoid group includes imidacloprid, one of the most popular garden insecticides sold in stores.
First developed in the late 1980s, neonicotinoids represented the first new class of insecticides in over 50 years. They are insect nervous system toxins widely used in horticulture, agriculture, and structural...
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