Jan. 30, 2013
His seminar will be from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in Room 1022 of the Life Sciences Addition, corner of Hutchison and Kleiber Hall drives, UC Davis campus. Host is graduate student Leslie Saul-Gershanz of the Neal Williams lab.
“Most bees nest underground; the remainder largely nesting above-ground, either in beetle holes in deadwood or in pity stems,” Cane says. “The vast majority of bees are non-social, yet only a very few of these species of each nesting habitats are managed for crop pollination. They will be used to illustrate realized and sustained population growth under management, as well as the factors that allow or impede broader use of non-social bees for agriculture.”
“ I will then summarize ongoing experience with methods and materials to multiply other native cavity-nesting bees, notably species of Osmia, desired to pollinate tree fruits, bramble fruits and native seed crops, highlighting the costs and challenges that emerge at larger scales of management.”
Cane has spent many of the past 25 years studying the nesting and pollination ecologies of native non-social bees of North America and elsewhere. He has worked with pollination and pollinators of alfalfa, cranberries, blueberries, squashes, almonds, raspberries and a host of native seed crops used for restoration seed. He is currently multiplying three species of Osmia bees for these applications.
For the past 13 years, Cane has worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the Pollinating Insect Research Unit at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. Prior to that, he was on the faculty of Auburn University in Alabama and was a post-doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley after receiving his doctorate from the University of Kansas.
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894