- (Focus Area) Environment
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Ever seen a honey bee and a butterfly sharing a lavender blossom?
Just in time for National Pollinator Week, June 17-23, we saw this today.
What could be more pollinator friendly than that?
The honey bee, Apis mellifera, and the Gulf Fritillary, Agraulis vanillae, meet on many a blossom. The butterfly usually flutters away, departing first.
This time the bee left first.
As Pollinator Partnership says on its website:
"Pollinator Week 2024 is a celebration of the vital...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Have you ever seen the digger bees on the sandy cliffs of Bodega Head, Sonoma County?
if you hike a short distance up a meandering trail, you'll see a landscape of turrets, the work of solitary, ground-nesting digger bees, Anthophora bomboides standfordina.
The nests remind us tiny sandcastles. The female bees did that!
In the early spring you'll see the bees nectaring on wild radish and other flowers.
These digger bees are found along the sandy cliffs of beaches along the Pacific Coast, not just Bodega Head. They're sometimes called the “Stanford bumble bee digger” because its subspecies name, “stanfordiana,” refers to a 1904 Stanford University...
- 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,...