- (Focus Area) Agriculture
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Show me the honey? Show me the California Honey Festival.
The annual event, which emphasizes the importance of bees, and promotes honey and honey bees and their products, will take place from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday, May 4 in downtown Woodland.
It's free and family friendly. It traditionally draws a crowd of some 40,000.
Amina Harris, who retired last June as director of the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center, co-founded the honey festival in 2017 with the City of Woodland. She actually "retired" to the family business, Z Food Specialty and The HIVE, Woodland, where her title is "Queen bee."
The California Honey Festival continues to partner with the Honey and Pollination Center in presenting the festival.
The organizers promise "something for everyone." You can expect honey tastings, bee observation hives, kids' activities, cooking demonstrations, live music, vendors and much more. The UC Davis-based California Master Beekeeper Program, which uses science-base information to educate stewards and ambassadors for honey bees and beekeeping, will not be participating this year. But science-based information on bees will be provided by the California State Beekeepers Association and the Sacramento Area Beekeepers' Association.
Ask them questions! And remember you can sign up for classes with the California Master Beekeeper Program (CAMPB), founded (2016) and directed by Elina Lastro Niño, associate professor of UC Cooperative Extension, apiculture. She is a member of the faculty of the Department of Entomology and Nematology. As the CAMPB website indicates: The organization is "a continuous train-the-trainer effort. The CAMBP's vision is to certify Honey Bee Ambassador, Apprentice, Journey, and Master level beekeepers so they can effectively communicate the importance of honey bees and other pollinators within their communities, serve as mentors for other beekeepers, and become the informational conduit between the beekeeping communities throughout the state and UCCE staff. Explore the Certifications Page for more information."
- Author: Ben Faber
State and County Profiles are now available. USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) released the profiles Mar. 27, 2024. These 2-page summaries include farms and farmland, value of sales, producer demographics, top crops, internet access and more from every state and county in the nation.
NASS released the much-anticipated ag census at nass.usda.gov/AgCensus and in Quick Stats on Feb. 13, 2024. Ag census data spans millions of data points about America's farms and ranches and the people who operate them. The once-every-five-years Census of Agriculture remains the only source of uniform, comprehensive, and impartial agriculture data down to the county level. Follow @usda_nass for the latest data highlights and news updates.
Census of Agriculture
2022 State and County Profiles
/h4>/h3>- Author: Whitney B Brim-Deforest
- Posted by: Gale Perez
This year brings several new chemical tools to California rice. With many herbicide-resistant species as well as emerging problematic weed species, the new chemistries are a welcome tool for managing resistance and preventing the selection of resistant biotypes.
Cliffhanger™ (benzobicyclon) was just registered in 2024, and is a new formulation of a previously-registered granular product already widely in use in California rice. Since it can be applied as a foliar product, it expands the timing that benzobicyclon can be applied in the flooded system. It can also be applied as a direct-stream application into the water. It is an HPPD-inhibitor, providing a good option for rotation. It controls sprangletop, ricefield bulrush and smallflower umbrella sedge. Additional tank-mix testing will be occurring this season to determine if it might be a good partner in combination with other herbicides for added late-season watergrass control.
The last product recently registered is Zembu™ (pyraclonil). Zembu™ is a granular formulation of pyraclonil, applied pre-emergence or at day-of-seeding into a flooded field. It provides control of smallflower umbrella sedge and broadleaf weeds, and provides suppression of watergrass. As a PPO-inhibitor, it is a new mode of action for watergrass, as the only other PPO-inhibitor registered in California rice only has activity on sedges. It will provide a great rotational option for growers at the beginning of the season, as well as a great partner product (for added control) with other granular into-the-water products.
As always, the label is the law, so make sure to read and follow the current labels for each of these herbicides (found on the manufacturers website or at the Department of Pesticide Regulation's website). Also check in locally with your Agricultural Commissioner's office for training information and any other county-specific requirements.
With these three new options, as well as the currently-registered products, rice growers in California should have a great suite of tools available this year, both for resistance management as well as to prevent the selection of future resistance. For help planning a weed management program, please reach out to your local Rice Farm Advisor.
Original source: UC Rice Notes newsletter • April 2024
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Give them a 21-insect net salute.
That's what occurred at a recent retirement celebration honoring the legacy of UC Davis distinguished professor emerita Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology for 34 years.
Kimsey, who joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology (now the Department of Entomology and Nematology) in 1989, became the director of the Bohart Museum in 1990.
Noted entomologist Richard "Doc" Bohart (1913-2007) founded the insect museum in 1946. UC Davis Chancellor James Meyer (1922-2002) dedicated the facility in 1986 as "the Bohart Museum of Entomology" at a ceremony in Briggs Hall. A highlight: Faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and others saluted him with a 21-insect net salute. They lined up, formed an archway with their nets, and Professor Bohart walked under the archway.
Kimsey, who was Bohart's last graduate student, recalled that event "as one of the funniest memories" of her career when she delivered a speech last November at the Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CA&ES) event honoring recipients of its excellence awards. Kimsey received the Exceptional Faculty Award.
Kimsey retired on Feb. 1, 2024 (but she's still doing research and continues to be the executive director of the Bohart Museum Society and the writer-editor-publisher of the quarterly Bohart newsletter.)
Then came the retirement celebration on April 6. Her colleagues, collaborators, faculty, staff and students gathered in a Mathematics Building classroom on Crocker Lane for speeches, and then headed over to the nearby Bohart Museum for the 21-insect net salute, a buffet and more tributes.
As Kimsey walked beneath the archway of the 21-insect net salute leading into the Bohart Museum, a chorus of cheers and applause greeted her.
She always remember that.
Just as she remembers the first insect net she received at age 5.
“I've always been interested in insects," Kimsey said. "I got my first insect net at age 5.” A portrait of her holding that net graces the Bohart Museum.
Under Kimsey's direction, the Bohart Museum that "Doc" Bohart founded 78 years ago expanded from 400 specimens to some eight million insect specimens today. It is the seventh largest insect collection in North America.
A recognized authority on biodiversity, systematics and biogeography of parasitic wasps, urban entomology, civil forensic entomology, and arthropod-related industrial hygiene, Kimsey holds two entomology degrees from UC Davis: a bachelor's degree (1976) and a doctorate (1979). "I got to pursue my bug interests," she said. "I know it was kind of weird, but even as a little kid it was fun."
It still is, Kimsey told the crowd at her retirement celebration.
The new Bohart Museum director is arachnologist and Professor Jason Bond, the Evert and Marion Schlinger Endowed Chair in the Department of Entomology and Nematology and associate dean, College of Environmental Sciences (CA&ES).
Resources:
- Access the UC Davis Entomology and Nematology website for the retirement celebration story.
- Listen to Kimsey's speech recorded by Walter Leal, UC Davis distinguished professor of molecular and cell biology and former chair of the Department of Entomology. It is posted on X (formerly Twitter) at https://x.com/wsleal2014/status/1776732932901863666)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Assistant professor Laura "Melissa" Guzman of the University of Southern California (USC) will discuss "Using Occupancy Models to Infer Trends of Bee Biodiversity in North America" at the April 29th seminar hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
Her seminar begins at 4:10 p.m. in 122 Briggs Hall and also will be on Zoom. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/9 5882849672
"Historical museum records provide potentially useful data for identifying drivers of temporal trends in species occupancy, however, because these records were not explicitly collected for this purpose, methodological developments are needed in order to enable robust inferences," Guzman writes in her abstract. "Occupancy-detection models, a relatively new and powerful suite of methods, are potentially useful here, because these models allow us to account for changes in collection effort through space and time. Applying such occupancy-detection models to historical museum records is not a straightforward process, as these models have strict data requirements that museum data usually do not meet."
"Here I will present a methodological road-map for using occupancy models to analyze historical museum records. I use simulated data-sets to identify how and when modeling decisions and patterns in data can bias inferences. I will focus primarily on the consequences of contrasting methodological approaches for dealing with species ranges and non-detections in both space and time. Finally, I will present an application of these methods to bees in North America and will present drivers of change for these species in the past 30 years."
Guzman says that the "overarching goal of my research is to develop statistical and computational methods to leverage large biodiversity datasets to learn about ecological processes. While we know that the distribution of some species is changing, it is actually very difficult to make reliable inferences as to which species are declining and by how much from the often messy and complex historical and spatial datasets that we have to work with — for example, historical museum records, where species occurrences are aggregated from studies with different sampling procedures."
"In order to address this gap," Guzman says, "my research focuses on determining if and how statistical models can be applied to historical records without yielding biased trends. In my research I also apply these statistical models to determine how the distribution of pollinators has changed through time, where museum records provide lots of information. I am also interested in determining which drivers (e.g. pesticide use, climate change, land use change, etc.) are causing the most decline of the most pollinator species."
"Another aspect of my research is to understand the processes that shape communities, for example, I have combined experiments and modelling to understand how the structure of body size in a community affects the stability of food webs. In more recent work, I used large-scale simulations and machine learning to identify the signal of metacommunity processes in ecological time series."
Guzman is a Gabilan assistant professor in USC's Department of Biological Sciences. She received two degrees from McGlll University: her bachelor's degree (2012) in biology and her master's degree (2013) in ecology and evolution. She obtained her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia.
She recently co-authored a piece in the journal Ecology titled "A Data Set for Pollinator Diversity and their Interactions with Plants in the Pacific Northwest," published in November 2022.
The abstract:
"Pollinator populations have declined substantially in recent years. The resulting loss in pollination services has both ecological and economic consequences, including reductions in plant diversity and crop production and lower food security. Data sets that identify pollinators and their plant hosts are of the utmost importance for the light can shed on the main causes of pollinator declines. Here we present a data set that contains 67,954 individual pollinator records. The data were collected across the Pacific Northwest, primarily focused in British Columbia (Canada), with 182 individual sites over 11 years, between 2005 and 2017. This data set comprises multiple studies that aimed to collect information on pollinator abundance, diversity, and their interactions with plants. Overall, the data set includes 937 morphospecies (of which 482 were identified to the species level) of pollinators across 105 families, including data for bees, wasps, butterflies, moths, and flies. We also present information on the interactions of these species, with 473 species of plants. The data set is being released for noncommercial use only. Credits should be given to this paper (i.e., proper citation)."
Guzman won the American Society of Naturalists Young Investigator Award, 2022-2023, and the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution Early Career Award, 2022-2023.
For any technical Zoom issues, contact seminar coordinator Brian Johnson at brnjohnson@ucdavis.edu. The full list of spring seminars is here.