- (Focus Area) Environment
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Internationally known honey bee geneticist Robert E. Page, Jr. is spotlighted in the current issue of American Entomologist in Marlin E. Rice's popular Legends feature.
Titled "Robert E. Page, Jr.: The Spirit of the Bee," it's a great article chronicling his life, his love of bees, and his massive number of achievements. Rice captured it well.
Rob, a native of Bakersfield and now 74, received his doctorate in 1980 from UC Davis, studying with major professor
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
How can you interest your children in insects?
"For me, at least a lot of my interest developed when my parents gave me a net and a butterfly picture book and then gave me enough independence to explore on my own," recalls UC Davis distinguished professor emerita Lynn Kimsey, who served 34 years as director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology before stepping down on Feb. 1.
"Today parents seem to schedule every minute of their kid's day with scheduled activities," Kimsey said, "and this simply doesn't allow kids to explore, and use...
- Author: Denise Godbout-Avant
The week of June 17-23 is National Pollinator Week, which celebrates the vital winged creatures we are so dependent on to pollinate most of the flowering plants in the world. Pollination is the process of transferring pollen from the anthers (male part of flower) to the stigma (female portion of flower), thus allowing fertilization to occur. Three-quarters of flowering plants and over one-third of the world's crop species depend on pollination for reproduction. Crops dependent on pollination include apples, berries, peaches, eggplant, coconut, cocoa, coffee, nuts, avocado, oil crops (i.e. sunflowers, sesame), soybeans, and melons.
Pollinators receive food in the form of nectar (source of sugar) or pollen (source of protein, fat,...
- Author: Michael Hsu
UCCE advisor outreaches to LGBTQ+ community, partners with Karuk Tribe in Northern California
Costumed as river creatures with papier mâché heads and dressed as the Army Corps of Engineers, Cleo Woelfle Hazard and a performance art group called The Water Underground dazzled the biennial Bay Delta Science Conference a few years ago.
Woelfle Hazard – then a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley – and his companions performed numbers from the film they were making, a “queer...
/h3>- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Bees, butterflies, beetles, birds and bats.
What do they have in common? Skipping the alliteration for a moment, they're all pollinators.
Honey bees grab the most attention, of course, and they do the bulk of the work. But so do bumble bees and other native bees.
But other pollinators include moths, hummingbirds, wasps and flies (especially the syrphid flies, aka hover flies or flower flies often mistaken for honey bees by the untrained eye.)
The National Park Service describes pollination as "anything that helps carry pollen from the male part of the flower (stamen) to the female part of the same or another flower...