Native bees will join the celebrated honey bees at the California Honey Festival.

The annual event, free and family friendly, takes place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, May 6 in downtown Woodland. 

Pollination ecologist Neal Williams, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and a 2015-2020 Chancellor's Fellow, will present a talk on "Pollination, the Importance of Native Bees and How to Promote Them" at 10:30 a.m. on the UC Davis Speakers' Stage.

"Pollination by insects, mostly bees, is critical to human wellbeing," Professor Williams said. "An astonishing 75 percent of food crops benefit to some extent from pollination, most of it provided by managed and wild bees. When thinking about pollination of crops, most of us consider honey bees–and they are a critical part of crop pollination.  However, native bees also play an important role and in some cases are better pollinators of crops than honey bees. In the presentation, I will provide an overview of the diversity, life history and biology of native bees. I will then discuss how we can use an understanding of bee biology to help sustain and promote diverse communities of wild bees."

Williams' research interests include pollination ecology, bee biology with emphasis on foraging behavior, ecology and evolution of trophic specialization and plant-pollinator interactions, landscape change and community dynamics, ecosystem services and conservation;

The California Honey Festival, launched in 2017 to celebrate the importance of bees and to promote honey and honey bees and their products, last year drew a crowd of 40,000. 

Amina Harris, director of the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center, Robert Mondavi Institute, and a co-founder of the festival, announced the list of speakers who will deliver 20 to 30-minute talks on the UC Davis Speakers' Stage, located just west of First Street.

The schedule on the UC Davis Speakers' Stage:

10:30 a.m.: Pollination ecologist and professor Neal Williams, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, who will discuss "Pollination, the Importance of Native Bees and How to Promote Them"

11 a.m.: Kitty Bolte, GATEways horticulturist, UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden, "Planting Your Garden to be a Welcoming Space for Pollinators"  

12 noon: Amina Harris,  director of the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center, and co-owner of Z Food Specialty and The HIVE, Woodland, "Let's Learn to Taste Honey."

1 p.m.: Wendy Mather, co-program manager of the California Master Beekeeper Program (CAMPB), "So, You Want to Be a Beekeeper?" 

1:30 p.m.: Jean-Philippe Marelli, senior director of Integrated Pest Management for Mars Wrigley Confectionery (also a journey level master beekeeper and Melipona beekeeper in Brazil), "Stingless Bees: The Amazing World of Melipona Bees"

2 p.m.: Cooperative Extension apiculturist/associate professor Elina Lastro Niño of Entomology and Nematology, and director of the California Master Beekeeper Program (CAMPB), "What Our Bee Research Is Teaching Us."

2:30 p.m.: Sanmu "Samtso" Caoji, a 2022-23 Hubert Humphrey fellow, and founder of the Shangri-la Gyalthang Academy, and CEO of the Cultural Information Consulting Company, "Empowering Women to Become Beekeepers and Bread Winners for Their Families While Keeping Bees in the Wild"

3 p.m.: Rachel Davis, coordinator of Bee City USA Woodland and chair of Bee Campus USA UC Davis (GATEways Horticulturist for the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden), "Woodland Is a Bee City; UC Davis Is a Bee City--What This Means to Our Communities"

UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology communications specialist Kathy Keatley Garvey will provide a background slide show of honey bees and native bees.

The event is both educational and entertaining. Attendees can taste honey, check out the  bee observation hives, watch cooking demonstrations and kids' shows, taste mead and other alcoholic drinks (if of age) and learn about bees from beekeepers and bee scientists. Vendors, offering various products and food, will line the streets.

The UC Davis-based California Master Beekeeper Program,  founded in 2016 by Niño,  provides a program of learning, teaching, research, and public service. They offer comprehensive, science-based information about honey bees and honey bee health.  Since 2016, the organization has donated 32,000 hours of volunteer time and served 186,630 individuals in education, outreach and beekeeping mentorship. Read more about their classes and their work on their website.

An after-party will be held from 5 to 9 p.m. at The HIVE Tasting Room and Kitchen, 1221 Harter Ave., Woodland.  It will feature pollinator-inspired food, drinks, and dancing to the music of Joy and Madness, an 8-piece soul and funk group.  Tickets are $20 and will benefit the California Master Beekeeper Program. "Each ticket includes entry to win a bountiful Yolo County food and drink basket (value $500)," Harris said.  More information is on this website.

It's billed as a "Bee Bash," but it should be "Big Bee Bash."

Urban entomologist Gordon Frankie, professor emeritus and research entomologist in the Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley, will be one of the speakers. He specializes in behavioral ecology of solitary bees in wildland and urban environments and co-authored the celebrated book, California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists: (Heyday Books, 2014) by UC scientists, including the late Robbin Thorp, UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology. The book is available online from UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR).

The Event: Bee Bash
Date: Saturday, April 1
Time: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Place: Annie's Annuals and Perennials, 740 Market Ave, Richmond, Calif.
Cost: Free

This is Annie's Annuals' first-ever Bee Bash. Earlier the plant nursery hosted spectacular butterfly summits. Butterfly guru Art Shapiro, distinguished professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, keynoted the 2018 summit. (Read his remarks on Bug Squad)

The schedule of events:

10 a.m.: Jennifer Jewell: “Invitations From and To the Garden: Cultivating Places & People”

11 a.m.: John Whittlesey: “Bumble Bees--Their Natural History & Designing Gardens to Support Them”

12:30: Tora Rocha and Angela Laws: “Maintaining Native Bee Habitats”

1:30 p.m.: Gordon Frankie: “Characteristics of Pollinator Habitat Gardens”

From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., attendees can peruse the bee information tables and the arts and crafts area. They can purchase plants from the nursery, and merchandise and food from vendors.  Music is also planned.

About the speakers:
Jewell hosts the national award-winning weekly public radio program and podcast, "Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden." She's authored several book, including The Earth in Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants (Timber Press in 2020); Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press, May 2021); and What We Sow, to be published later this year by Timber Press.

Whittlesey is a nurseryman, garden designer, and author of The Plant Lovers Guide to Salvias,  published by Timber Press in 2014. 

Rocha is the founder and leader of the Pollinator Posse, a volunteer group based in Oakland that creates “pollinator corridors” in and around the Bay Area.  (Check out the Pollinator Posse Facebook page.)

Laws, a community ecologist, holds the title of Endangered Species Conservation Biologist, Xerces Society of Invertebrate Conservation.

California Bees and Blooms is the work of Frankie, Thorp, Barbara Ertter of UC Berkeley, and Rollin Coville, a UC Berkeley doctoral alumnus and photographer.  Thorp, 1933-2019 (see tribute) also co-authored Bumble Bees of North America: An Identification Guide (Princeton University, 2014).

Want a card set of California's common bees to help you identify them and learn more about them? The newly published (second edition) card set, "Common Bees in California," is available on the UC ANR catalog. From the website: "Nearly 1600 species of native bees can be found in California's rich ecosystems; this colorful pocket field guide will help you identify bees commonly found in urban gardens and landscapes." Frankie is one of the co-authors.

Resource:
Native Bees Are a Rich Natural Resource in Urban California Gardens (California Agriculture, Volume 63, Number 3) 

Lauren Ponisio, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Oregon who seeks to preserve and restore populations of bees and other pollinators, will speak on "Disease in Plant-Pollinator Communities" at the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology seminar at 4:10 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 8 in 122 Briggs Hall.

Her seminar also will be virtual. The Zoom link: 
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672. Host is community ecologist Rachel Vannette, associate professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

"Infectious disease prevalence is among the top five drivers of global extinction, including in wild bees," the bee biologist says in her abstract. "With the global decline of wild bees, our work aims to contribute to understanding how community characteristics shape infectious disease prevalence in plant-pollinator communities. Infectious parasites can influence host immunity, physiology, and reproduction. The sharing of floral resources is a common mode of disease transmission among pollinators."

"Increasing host aggregation on floral resources can increase disease prevalence, that is, amplification," Ponisio noted. "Conversely, high host species diversity---even if accompanied by host aggregation---may dilute infection. Because bees pick up parasites from flowers, but not all flowers transmit parasites equally, flower abundance and diversity may further contribute to parasite dilution. In three systems, mass-blooming sunflower in Yolo County, CA, harvested forests in Coast Range, OR, and high elevation meadows across the Southwestern U.S., I examine how the factors that shape plant-pollinator abundance and diversity and the ramifications for parasite prevalence in wild bee communities. Across all systems, more than 40% of bees have at one parasite. Both natural (phenology) and human-induced (years post-harvest, mass-blooming crops) modification of the bee and floral communities indirectly affected parasitism by altering host community characteristics. I found a consistent amplification effect of host (bee) abundance and detected dilution through either host diversity or floral diversity in each system."

On her website, Ponisio elaborates: "We focus on understanding the mechanisms by which species interactions maintain species diversity, and how we can harness these processes to manage and restore diversity in human-modified systems. We focus on pollinators because they are critical for pollination in managed and natural plant communities, but our research is broadly applicable across ecological interactions. Our aim to discover new insights into how communities form, evolve, and persist through time and space, aiding in the prediction and prevention of community collapse. We combine modeling, synthesis and field-based work, and adhere to the principles of reproducible, open science."

Lauren, who grew up in Fresno, holds a bachelor's degree in biology, with honors, in ecology and evolution (2010) from Stanford University, and her master's degree in biology (2011) from Stanford. She received her doctorate from the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management, UC Berkeley, in 2016.

She conducted postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley and served on the faculty at UC Riverside before accepting her current position. She received graduate fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Food and Agriculture, as well as a postdoctoral fellowship from the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. She was named among the Global Food Initiative's “30 Under 30” in Food Systems in 2016.  

Ponisio says one of her most difficult field work experiences occurred in Yosemite National Park, according to her People Behind the Science podcast. "Their study on the effects of fires on pollinators required them to backpack out to remote sites where there had been natural fires. Lauren started working months ahead of time to get ready for the trip and prepare dehydrated meals for the lab to eat. One day, they opened the large canister where they had been storing their food to protect it from bears, and they discovered the food was gone. All that was left was a handwritten note from someone thanking them for leaving out food."

"The next day, the lab's field assistant tripped over a log and sprained her ankle. Then they accidentally left their sampling gear at a site and had to hike all the way back to retrieve it. Later, a bear came into their campsite and destroyed many of the traps they needed to collect pollinators for their study. At this point, Lauren and her colleagues were exhausted, surviving on snacks, their field assistant could barely walk, and much of the equipment they needed had been destroyed. In the face of all of these challenges, Lauren stayed calm. These kinds of things happen in field research, and everyone made it back to share the story."

Ponisio was featured on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" in January of 2021 when she discussed "Wildfires Open Forests for Wildlife and Research."

Ponisio is the lead author of a recently submitted journal paper, "Mass-Flowering Crops Attract Bees, Amplifying Parasitism,"  co-authored by G. P. Smith, H. Sardinas, J. Zorn, Q. S. McFrederick and S. H.Woodard. (See CV)

The UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology's winter seminars are held on Wednesdays at 4:10 p.m. in 122 Briggs Hall. All are virtual. They are coordinated by urban landscape entomologist Emily Meineke, assistant professor. (See schedule.) She may be reached at ekmeineke@ucdavis.edu for technical issues.

Honey bees and native bees love capeweed, Arctotheca calendula, also called South African capeweed, cape dandelion and cape marigold or cape gold.

It's an invasive plant originating from the Cape Province in South Africa (Here's what the California Invasive Council says about it:

"Capeweed (Arctotheca calendula) is an annual or perennial evergreen herb that, when young, forms a low-growing rosette of heavily pinnately lobed leaves, with undersides covered by woolly down. With age, it forms an extensive, dense, mat-like groundcover by proliferation of rooting stems (stolons) from rosettes. Leaves are pinnately lobed; fine, dense hairs cause stems and leaves to appear silvery. Flowers are approximately two inches in diameter, lemon yellow, and daisy-like with yellow centers. The plant is conspicuous in late spring and early summer due to its increase in size and the profusion of large yellow daisies. Plants are seldom solitary, and they spread vigorously by creeping stems (Lasca Leaves 1968)."

Capeweed may have arrived in California in a shipment of grass seed from Australia, where it is a common weed, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture.  The invasive species compendium (CABI) listed it as a noxious weed in 2010 in California.

However, it's cultivated as an ornamental ground cover and has both "fertile" and "sterile" forms. 

We've seen lawnmowers run over the the weed in City of Benicia parks (yes, it grows back), we've seen it thriving in a gold carpet along coastal California, and we've seen bees foraging on it.  

It's a pollinator paradise, of sorts, but it's also invasive.