Take the creative and collaborative minds of students studying design and entomology at the University of California, Davis.

Add an innovative project involving insects.

Add three talented instructors: Diane Ullman, professor of entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and lecturers Gale Okumura and Morissa Rubin of the UC Davis Department of Design 

Result: an art exhibition, “The World of Insects: Paper, Tile, Branding and Packaging.” to take place from 6 to 8 p.m., Wednesday, June 6 in the Environmental Horticulture courtyard, located near Walter A. Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center on Alumni Drive. The event is free and open to the public.

Background: Students in Design 116 and Entomology 001 "collaborated in discussing entomological science and design principles,” said Ullman, who is director of the Career Discovery Group Program, part of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. "Entomology students did case study research on the assigned insect, met with their design partners and then created designs to communicate a concept or concepts about their insect. They used the silk screening process to print their designs and create multiples of each on paper, as well as on ceramic tile. With their paper projects they then created a final project. These projects, their fired tiles and their case studies will be on display."

Ullman described it as “a very interesting and profitable collaboration that taught the students to think outside the box, collaborate across disciplines and communicate science visually.”

The students will display their branding and packaging of their product for edible insects, said Okumura. "The design students were to create a pattern from the assigned insect, as well as design a logo for their branding, which was then applied to their packaging and business system," she said. "The packaging had be appealing to the consumer and in some sense, change behavior of the audience to buy edible insects by having appealing graphics."

Rubin said the silkscreen prints "focus on illustrations of the insect and its key features (entomology students) or graphic patterns derived from significant markings or features of the insect. Additionally design students have developed an insect related product and its entire graphic identity."

Bottom line: Prepare to enter an amazing world you may not have seen before--the incredible world of insects, coupled with innovative marketing and designs.

And maybe, just maybe, you'll add crickets to your diet?

If you haven't already?

So here's this Gulf Fritillary (Agraulis vanillae) clinging to a lavender stem in our pollinator garden.

It is all alone--for a little white.

Then here come honey bees seeking to forage on the lavender, too.

One bee buzzes next to the butterfly's wing. Then it soars up and over.

Too much traffic for this butterfly. It moves to the nearby catmint patch.

The showy butterfly, a brilliant orange-reddish masterpiece with silver-spangled underwings, first appeared in California in the vicinity of San Diego in the 1870s, according to noted butterfly researcher Art Shapiro, professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis. He's been monitoring the butterfly populations of central California since 1972 and maintains this website.

From San Diego, “it spread through Southern California in urban settings and was first recorded in the Bay Area about 1908," says Shapiro. "It became a persistent breeding resident in the East and South Bay in the 1950s and has been there since.”

Shapiro says it “apparently bred in the Sacramento area and possibly in Davis in the 1960s, becoming extinct in the early 1970s, then recolonizing again throughout the area since 2000.”

The Gulf Frit's host plant is the passionflower vine (Passiflora). Plant it and they will come. Plant some lavender and catmint, too, for food sources. You'll be rewarded by the joy of seeing these beautiful masterpieces fluttering into your yard.

We remember photographing a young beekeeper, Mikayla Hagan of the Rio Vista (Calif.) 4-H Club, when she delivered presentations at Solano County 4-H events.

Yes, 4-H'ers can enroll in beekeeping projects--if a club offers them. And they should!

Rewind to the 2012 Solano County Project Skills Day. We were photographing an enthusiastic Mikalya talking about her beekeeping project to Mike Reagan, then a member of the Solano County Board of Supervisors. Her project: "Honey Muffins." She won a showmanship award, the highest award given.

Fast forward to today.

Mikalya is a senior at Rio Vista High School and the recipient of one of six college agricultural scholarships awarded by the Friends of the Dixon May Fair. In fact, she won the Jack Hopkins Scholarship of $1,500, the top award in the two-year community college category.

The little girl fascinated by honey bees now plans a career as a large animal veterinary technician. “All my life I have loved being involved with animals, which has driven me to become a large animal veterinary technician," she wrote in her scholarship application.  A longtime member of the Rio Vista 4-H Club, she joined the youth organization in first grade. “My first animal project was to raise two market goats for the Dixon May Fair." 

“I have continued to show animals up until the present," wrote Mikalya. "In that time, I have raised honey bees and have shown market steers, market chickens, roaster ducks, market turkeys and many market and breeding meat goats, exhibiting several champion and reserve champion animals at both the Dixon May Fair and Solano County Fair. She joined the Rio Vista FFA when she started high school and received several degrees, including the chapter degree and state farmer degree. She plans to obtain her general education at Solano Community College and then transfer to Cosumnes River College, Sacramento, or Carrington College, Sacramento, for the veterinary technician program.

The Friends of the Fair, the service-oriented and fundraising arm of the Dixon May Fair, has awarded an incredible  $186,250 in college scholarships since its founding in 2000. The organization raises funds primarily through the sale of beverages sold at the Dixon May Fair.

“We're proud to help our college students majoring in agriculture,”  Donnie Huffman of Vacaville, president of the Friends of the Fair since 2000, told the crowd gathered Wednesday, May 30 on the Dixon May Fair grounds. “This was our 19th year at the fair and one of our best years.” At this year's fair, May 10-13, the gross sales of beverages totaled $164,446.

“This is where we get our money for scholarships,” Huffman said.

Mikayla joined five other recipients in the winners' circle--and all are in 4-H or are 4-H alums:

• Jillian Raycraft of Dixon, a 2015 graduate of Dixon High School and a student at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo, received the top award, the $3000 Ester Armstrong Scholarship. The scholarship memorializes a fair industry veteran who served as interim chief executive officer from 2006 to 2009. Career plans: agriculture finance and policy.
• Mackenzie Davi of Dixon, a senior at Dixon High School and soon-to-be student at California State University, Chico, received the newly created $2500 JoAn Giannoni Award. The annual award honors a Dixon resident who served as the long-time scholarship chair and secretary of Friends of the Fair. Career plans: agricultural teacher.
• Rebecca Luedke of Dixon, a 2013 graduate of Dixon High School and a student California State University, Chico, won the $2000 award. Career plans: animal nutritionist,
• Halie Pringle of Vacaville, a 2018 graduate Vacaville High School and a pending student at Solano Community College, won the $1250 award. Career plans: agricultural business/soil sciences.  
• Cameron Garlick of Dixon, a 2017 graduate of Dixon High School and a second-year student at Butte Community, Oroville, won the $1000 award. Career plans: plant crop advisor.

All Friends of the Fair scholarship recipients must be graduates of a Solano County high school, and be enrolled in a California college, majoring in an agricultural field. (More information on the scholarship application rules is available on the Friends of the Fair site at http://www.friendsofthefair.org. The deadline to apply each year is March 1.)

It's good to see organizations such as the Friends of the Fair honor our youth, our leaders of tomorrow, and skilled in agriculture. Scholarship chair Carrie Hamel of the Friends of the Fair--she's a finance officer with the Department of Public Health Sciences, UC Davis School of Medicine--said applicants are scored on personal, civic and academic experience; academic standing; personal commitment and established goals; leadership potential; civic accomplishments; chosen field in the areas of agriculture. Most recipients have experience in 4-H, FFA or Grange—activities desired but not mandated. Some successful applicants have all three!

As far as we know, only one scholarship recipient enrolled in a 4-H beekeeping project and learned to keep bees, our littlest agricultural workers.

Congratulations to all!

"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble, it's the things we do know that just ain't so."--American humorist Artemus Ward (1834-1867).

This quote, often falsely attributed to Mark Twain, is a favorite of Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis.

Speaking at the second annual Butterfly Summit last Saturday, May 26 at Annie's Annuals and Perennials, Richmond, Shapiro discussed his research and offered his observations and views on the state of butterflies.  He maintains a website at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/

Shapiro has monitored butterfly population trends on a transect across central California for 46 years. The 10 sites stretch from the Sacramento River Delta through the Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada mountains to the high desert of the Western Great Basin. Shapiro visits his sites every two weeks "to record what's out." The largest and oldest database in North America, it was recently cited by British conservation biologist Chris Thomas in a worldwide study of insect biomass.

"The vast majority of the butterflies we monitor are emerging earlier in the year now than they were in the 1970s," Shapiro said. He mentioned the Red Admiral butterfly, Vanessa atalanta, which spends the winter as an adult, is "our biggest responder to global warming, coming out 21 days earlier on average that it use to, exactly the same in England, same species. It's not weird at all. It is winter active."

His research shows that not only are butterflies coming out earlier, but "we also find trends in population and species richness."

Shapiro, a member of the UC Davis faculty since 1971 and author of the book, Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento Valley Regions, said that "in a nutshell, at low elevations, butterfly faunas have been declining slowly until 1999. In 1999, 17 species had an abrupt fall in abundance, spontaneously. On its face, this was a non-random event. The decline was then rapid from 1999 to the onset of the recent drought and then things went up again."

"Things rebounded during the drought," the professor said. "We began getting better data both in terms of numbers of species and abundances. A blast from the past...When the drought ended, we had a very wet year two years ago, and now things are sliding down again. What is going on, ladies and gentlemen? What is going on?"

Shapiro noted that by and large, immature butterflies spend the winter underground or right at the surface. "This is the worst possible environment for overwintering butterflies in the early stages, what with the combination of warm and wet." The high humidity and temperature are very favorable for fungal and bacterial pathogens, he said, adding that  "Overwintering survival in warm wet conditions is poor."

"When we have a dry winter, it's colder at night but not cold enough to be lethal, he said. "It's a healthier environment to be an overwintering caterpillar. That's what we think is going on."

In the mountains or higher elevations, changes are strongly correlated with climate. "As it gets too warm and dry down below, butterflies are moving uphill, but plant resources are moving up the slope more slowly. When resources are not available yet higher up, butterflies have a real problem. There's no where to go at all for truly alpine species; they're already at the top of the mountain. The next stop is heaven." Shapiro described the decline of butterfly populations in the mountains as "worrisome."

Neonicotinoids, which Shapiro defined as "a class of synthetic pesticides chemically derived from the chemistry of nicotine," are often targeted as a cause of butterfly decline. "Neonics are not in Scotland and there's been no butterfly decline in Scotland," he pointed out. "But, anyone who has taken a statistics course knows that Correlation Is Not Causation."

Turning to monarchs, Shapiro said "More than half of the questions I get from the public deal with monarchs."

Describing the monarch as "the poster child for conservation,"  Shapiro said: "There's a lot of stuff out there in the media, and it's not all to be believed." Butterfly population counts differ from summer breeding data and the overwintering data.

"If you want the scoop on monarchs--unconnected with fundraising or politics," he said, "read Anurag Agrawal's book, Monarchs and Milkweed."  The book is subtitled "A Migrating Butterfly, a Poisonous Plant and their Remarkable Story of Coevolution." Agrawal, the James A. Perkins Professor of Environmental Science at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., received his doctorate in population biology from UC Davis in 1999.

"Monarchs in California have had a long decline, perhaps more dramatic than the decline in the Midwest and the East," Shapiro said, adding they have never been as common in California than they are in the East. "If they're relatively scare, that doesn't mean a decrease. We need to do comparisons over time. During the drought, they came back. We don't know why."

Shapiro also said that monarchs are winter-breeding in California, something they didn't do 10 years ago. "It started in southern California, maybe a decade ago and is now spreading to the inland empire. They're well established in the East and South Bay." He said he heard one report of monarchs winter-breeding in Woodland, Yolo County.

"Monarchs can't breed in the winter here under natural conditions," Shapiro said. "A non-native, non-dormant milkweed, tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) allows winter breeding. These plants are often contaminated with the parasite, Ophryocystis elektroscirrha or OE, a problem in Southern California, but not yet in northern California. "People who are really committed to native plants would like you to get rid of your exotic tropical milkweed and replace it with native species that go dormant." He recommends "cutting them back three times a year" to allow fresh new growth.

Some of his take-home messages:

• Butterfly faunas are declining in most parts of the North Temperate Zone where monitoring is done. The most severe declines have been in European grassland faunas. By those standards, we're not that bad off (yet?).
• At low elevations in California, declines were moderate until 1999, when they accelerated abruptly. Our multivariate statistical analyses suggest (but cannot prove!) that climate change has been only a minor factor, while habitat conversion and loss, and loss of habitat connectivity share the blame equally with pesticides, specifically neonicotinoids.
• At higher elevations in the Sierra Nevada, species at tree-line have declined in response to climate change but there have been no losses attributable to habitat conversion or pesticides. Many species are moving upslope (or trying to, because they are more mobile than their essential plant resources).
• The recent “1000-year drought” had dramatic impacts. At low elevations, butterfly faunas rebounded from recent lows, probably due to a better environment for overwinter survival. In the mountains the opposite happened: lack of snow cover led to poor overwinter survival and faunas plummeted to unprecedented lows at places like Donner Summit. The heavy snow pack of winter 2016-17 did little to improve things, because the number of animals going into overwintering was already so low.
• We are already seeing low-elevation faunas slipping back into decline. Because most montane butterflies have only one generation a year, it will take several favorable years to rebound from the losses there.
• Our research revealed that California monarch populations had been in decline for decades, perhaps more so than in the East and Midwest.
• This was true even though the usual “suspect” causes – GMOs and milkweed shortages – do NOT appear to apply here.
• There was also a change in the seasonal breeding pattern of monarchs during the worst of the decline.
• During the drought, monarch populations rebounded significantly here, and their historic seasonal breeding pattern returned. But this year we seem to be going back to pre-drought patterns.
• Winter breeding by monarchs began in Southern California several years ago and has now spread to the Bay Area. Overwintering monarchs are supposed to be in reproductive diapause cued mainly by daylength. Why a growing percentage of them are not is a mystery which has not been solved as of this afternoon.