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 at the Yolo County Fairgrounds, 1250 E. Gum St., Woodland (a change from downtown Woodland.) The venue was moved due to "unpredictable weather and high winds."

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." 

This portrait of Lynn Siri, then age 5, graces the Bohart Museum of Entomology. As Lynn Siri Kimsey, she directed the museum from 1990 to Feb. 1, 2024.

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)

Melissa Guzman of Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California.

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.

An image of a damselfly photographed in Hawaii, and images of a blowfly and a monarch photographed in California won the Photo Salon recently hosted by the Pacific Branch, Entomological Society of America (PBESA)

Photo Salon coordinator Joshua Milnes, an entomologist with the Plant Protection Division, Washington State Department of Agriculture, Yakima, announced the winners as: 

• First, Robert Peck, entomologist with the University of Hawaii, for his image of a damselfly
• Second,  Alexander Nguyen,  a UC Davis entomology alumnus, for his image of a blowfly 
• Third,  Kathy Keatley Garvey of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, for her image of a monarch.

PBESA showcased the images at its annual meeting, held April 14-17, in Waikoloa Beach, Hawaii. The photo competition, themed “Pineapple Madness,” was open to all PBESA members. Membership covers 11 Western states, plus U.S. territories and parts of Canada and Mexico.

Winning entrants in this year's competition "not only received bragging rights,"  Milnes said, but also cash prizes. The first-place winner received $50, plus a printed photo; second place, $25, plus a printed photo, and third place, $25.

Robert Peck 

“The damselfly in my photo is Megalagrion calliphya, with the common name, Beautiful Hawaiian Damselfly," said Peck, an entomologist with the Hawaii Cooperative Studies Unit, University of Hawaii, Hilo.  “It can be found around standing pools of water in Hawaiian forests.”  Peck captured the image in his backyard in Volcano, Hawaii. This was his first submission in the Photo Salon competition.  His camera gear: a Canon EOS 7D Mark II with a Tokina 90 macro lens.

Alexander Nguyen

 “I took this image (of a blowfly) while visiting my good friend, and fellow UC Davis entomology alumnus Joel Hernandez, in Woodland," Nguyen said. "I'm a long time user of Canon cameras and have no plans to switch. This was photographed using the newer R5 mirrorless model. I currently reside in Sonoma County serving that region in the Agricultural Commissioner's office.”  This was his third win in an ESA-hosted competition. Nguyen's image of a hoverfly, photographed in the UC Davis Stebbens Cold Canyon Reserve, won an international competition and appeared in the ESA 2018 Insects of the World calendar.  (See Bug Squad blog) In 2022, his photo of red imported fire ants placed second in the PBESA Photo Salon.

Kathy Keatley Garvey 

Garvey, a communications specialist with the Department of Entomology and Nematology, captured her image of a monarch foraging on milkweed in a Vacaville garden. Her camera gear: a Nikon D500 with a 200mm macro lens. She earlier won several awards in ESA-hosted competitions. Her image of a golden dung fly, Scathophaga stercoraria, won the Entomological Society of America (ESA) medal for "Best Image by an ESA Member" in the  64th annual International Insect Salon competition, held in 2022. Her image of two Melissodes agilis bees buzzing over a sunflower, Tithonia rotundifola, won "Best Image by an ESA member" at the 63rd North Central Insect Photographic Salon, co-sponsored by the North Central Branch of ESA and the Photographic Society of America. Two other Garvey images also won acceptances in the North Central competition. 

Entries are now being accepted through May 12 for the 2025 ESA World of Insects Calendar.  "Photographers of all backgrounds, areas of expertise, career stage, and geographical location are invited to submit photos," according to the  ESA website.  "No entomological training or expertise is required, and you do not need to be an ESA member to enter." Submitted images may also be considered for ESA's weekly "Arthropod Photo of the Week" feature on social media, via the #arthropodPOTW hashtag on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Mastodon.