- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's Friday Fly Day, and time to post an image of a fly that masquerades as a bee.
That would be "the bee fly," a fly so named because it resembles a bee
Order: Diptera. Family: Bombyliidae.
In its adult stage, it's a pollinator that feeds on nectar and pollen. In its larval stage, it's parasitoid. The adult bee fly lays her eggs in the nests of wasps, beetles or solitary bees and the developing larvae eat their host.
"The Bombyliidae include at least 4,500 described species, and certainly thousands more remain to be described," Wikipedia tells us. "However, most species do not often appear in abundance, and compared to other major groups of pollinators they are much less likely to visit flowering plants in urban parks or suburban gardens. As a result, this is arguably one of the most poorly known families of insects relative to its species richness. The family has a patchy fossil record, with species being known from a handful of localities the oldest known species are known from the Middle Cretaceous Burmese amber, around 99 million years old."
Bee flies have also acquired the nickname of "bomber flies." That because when the adult female is ready to "gift" a host with her eggs, she hovers over the burrow in mid-air and flicks her eggs.
Aren't insects amazing?
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's Arachtober and that means celebrating arachnids for the entire month of October.
Well, we ought to celebrate them year around, but October is THEIR month.
Let's especially applaud crab spiders when they prey on such agricultural pests as the lygus bug, also known as the "western tarnished plant bug." It's a member of the genus Lygus in the family Miridae and feeds on plants by piercing the plant tissues.
The lygus bug is easily distinguished by the triangular mark on its back.
The western tarnished plant bug (Lygus hesperus) is known as a very serious pest of cotton, strawberries and seed crops such as alfalfa, entomologists tell us. In California alone, the bug causes $30 million in damage to cotton plants each year, "and at least $40 million in losses to the state's strawberry industry," according to Wikipedia.
"Lygus bugs are one of the causes of irregularly shaped, cat-faced strawberries; another cause may be poor pollination, which results in small undeveloped seeds," says UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM) in its Pest Management Guidelines. "Lygus bugs damage fruit by puncturing individual seeds; this, in turn, stops development of the berry in the area surrounding the feeding site. Straw-colored seeds that are large and hollow are a good indication of lygus bug damage. Lygus bug damage is more of a problem in strawberry-growing areas where continuous fruit production occurs.
"Adults are about 0.25 inch (6 mm) long, oval, and rather flattened," UC IPM points out. "They are greenish or brownish and have reddish-brown markings on their wings."
So what happens when a crab spider nails a lygus bug?
The cheering section is loud.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
An international leader in honey bee research--Juliana Rangel Posada--will speak on "Don't Compromise: Food Lipid Content Shapes Protein-Lipid Regulation in Honey Bee (Apis Mellifera) Nurses" at 4:10 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 7 in 122 Briggs Hall. Her seminar also will be broadcast on Zoom. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672.
Can't attend or Zoom in? Her seminar will be archived on the Entomology and Nematology seminar website at https://entomology.ucdavis.edu/seminars.
"Regulating nutrient intake is a fundamental and multidimensional challenge for all animals," Posada says in her abstract. "Typically, animals prioritize macronutrient intake, and we know much about protein-carbohydrate regulation. In contrast, we know relatively little about protein-lipid regulation, especially among palynivores like bees that feed on food (pollen) that has high, but variable, protein and lipid content."
"Using a Geometric Framework or nutrition experimental approach, we show that nurse honey bees (Apis melliera) maximized their protein-lipid intake on diets that had a 3:2 protein:lipid ratio and that it was lowest on highly lipid-based diets," she continued. "In choice experiments with nutritionally complementary diets, bees self-selected a protein-based diet. However, total consumption was suppressed when a lipid-biased food was present. Our collective results suggest bees actively regular the intake of both protein and lipid, but that lipid regulation is particularly strict. Our findings have implications for honey bee and palynivore ecology, and nutritional ecology more broadly."
Posada joined the TAMU College of Agriculture and Life Sciences faculty in January 2013. She is active in the Texas Beekeepers Association and has addressed dozens of beekeeping associations across the United States and internationally.
Posada and her research group at Texas A&M found that a widely used pesticide—the miticide amitraz—used to protect honey bees from mite infestation, has an effect on mating among the queens. (See Entomology Today, a publication of the Entomological Society of America)
She's also an outstanding teacher, the recipient of TAMU awards and the 2023 Excellence Achievement Award in Teaching, Southwestern Branch of the Entomological Society of America.
Nematologist Amanda Hodson, assistant professor, is coordinating the ENT seminars. The full list is here. For more information or for technical issues, contact Hodson at akhodson@ucdavis.edu.
Resources:
- Interview with a Social Insect Scientist, published in 2017 by Insectessociaux
- Biology of Mating, National Honey Show Lecture Series 2015, YouTube
- Bee Happy: Maximizing Honey Bee Characteristics for Health Bees, Finding Genus Podcast
- Posada lab Facebook page: facebook.com/TAMUhoneybeelab
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Praying, preying, or peering?
This female praying mantis, a Stagmomantis limbata, selects a patch of red Lantana to watch for pollinators.
Her spiked forelegs resting, her eyes always watching but her body as still as a stone, she makes an incredible predator portrait. That triangular head, those bulging eyes, that pencil-thin "neck."
Her common names included "bordered mantis, bosque mantis, Arizona mantis, and New Mexico praying mantis." This species is native to North America and considered most prevalent in the southwestern United States.
What's for breakfast? A bee, a butterfly, a syrphid fly?
What's for lunch? What's for dinner? What's for snacks?
She need not worry. She's a great ambush predator.
A limbata in the Lantana.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
What we've been waiting for all season...
A migratory monarch butterfly fluttered into our Vacaville garden at noon today (Tuesday, Sept. 17) and nectared on a Mexican sunflower, Tithonia rotundifola.
Then she treated us to a butterfly ballet.
The Danaus plexippus touched down, nectared, shot up, dropped down, and did it all over again, while male territorial longhorned bees tried to make her stay short.
But she hung around for and hour.
Wings up...and she was gone.
And then another flashed by...
It's migratory monarch season.