February promises to be a "honey of a month" for the Honey and Pollination Center, UC Davis.

Thank the girls (the worker bees), the honey they produce, and visitors' yearnings to taste some of nature's delectable liquid gold.

First on tap is the "World of Honey--North America" event from 6:30 to 8:30 pm., Wednesday, Feb. 1 in the Sensory Theatre at the Mondavi Institute of Wine and Food Science, UC Davis campus. Amina Harris, director of the Honey and Pollination Center, says the varietal honeys featured will be:

• Avocado from Mexico
• Meadowfoam from Oregon
• American bamboo from New York and
• Orange blossom from California and Florida

Pollination ecologist Neal Williams, associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and a Chancellor's Fellow, will discuss native pollinators. His research ranges from basic bee and pollination biology to conservation biology and agricultural pollination. Among his many interests: the interactions of floral visitors and the flowers they pollinate, as well as their foraging activities.

In addition to directing the Honey and Pollination Center, Harris co-owns Z Specialty Food, LLC, Woodland, with her husband and son. A Z Specialty division, Moon Shine Trading Company, has been offering unique American varietal honeys for more than 30 years, winning awards from the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade (NASFT) and the National Honey Board. Harris served on the NASFT board of directors for six years and also chaired the NASFT Winter and Spring Show Committees for several years.

To register for World of Honey, access this site on the UC Davis College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences.

And mark your calendar for another sweet event! Valentine's Day is nearing and that means it's time for the Honey and Pollination Center's annual fundraiser, "The Feast: A Celebration of Mead and Honey." The popular event is set from 6 to 9 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 11 at the Mondavi Center for Wine and Food Science. More information and registration will be posted here.

The Honey and Pollination Center, headquartered in the Mondavi Institute of Wine and Food Science and affiliated with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, seeks to increase "consumer, industry and stakeholder understanding of the importance of bees, pollination, honey and other products of the hive to people and the environment through research, education, and outreach," Harris said.

In addition, the center has calendared a number of other events for 2017, including

• April 18: World of Honey Tasting Series (International)
• May 5-6: California Honey Festival (Woodland, Calif.)
• May 7: UC Davis Bee Symposium
• June 19-22: Advanced Mead Making

Bon appétit!

It was an unexpected find, but it was right on time.

Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, figured it was too rainy and too cold to head over to West Sacramento to look for the first cabbage white butterfly of the year, so he walked around campus Thursday.

And he found it.

Shapiro nabbed the cabbage white butterfly, Pieris rapae, at 1:56 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 19 in the student gardens near the Solano Park Apartments.

He again won the annual Butterfly-for-a-Beer contest, which he launched in 1972 as part of his long-term studies of butterfly life cycles and climate. 

The contest rules indicate that the first person who finds the first cabbage white butterfly of the year in the three-county area of Yolo, Solano and Sacramento receives a pitcher of beer or its equivalent.

Shapiro, who has been defeated only four times in the contest (and all by UC Davis graduate students) said this was the first find on the campus.

“Earlier today I was asked when P. rapae would come out, given the very wet January this year. I replied that when it stopped raining. we'd probably get into tule fog…and that would take us into February for any decent butterfly weather.”

Jan. 19 dawned with a “a cold, unstable air mass overhead,” Shapiro recalled, describing it as “an ideal convective day, with showers and thundershowers popping up.”

With the ground and the vegetation sopping wet, he figured this would not a “potential rapae day.”

“When I got out of class at noon it was bright and sunny, clear overhead but with cumulus building to the west over the Coast Range. It felt warm and I might have gone to West Sacramento, but decided by the time I got there it would have clouded over and perhaps even be raining. So I got lunch and then walked over to the student gardens near the Solano Park Apartments just to gather host plant for my rapae culture--yes, I'm mass-rearing the bugs for photoperiod studies, and have some 100 live ones in a refrigerator."

“It remained sunny and got quite warm—55 or 56, I'd say," Shapiro related. "The vegetation was indeed sopping wet. At 12:59 I saw—a rapae. It was sitting quietly, wings folded, on a cultivated Brassica. It had not opened its wings to body-bask, that is, warm the body by exposure to incoming solar radiation. If it had, it almost certainly would have flown and, being netless, I would have lost it. Instead it just sat there as I picked it off the plant. I always carry one glasseine envelope in my eyeglass case. Into the envelope it went. It's a winter-phenotype male and, I imagine, had just emerged this morning and not yet flown.”

“This is the second year in a row that the first rapae was found in a garden rather than one of the conventional ‘warm pockets,' Shapiro noted. “What does it all mean?”

The 2016 winner was also found in a garden when UC Davis ecology graduate student Jacob Montgomery stepped outside his home in West Davis on Jan. 16 and collected it.

Davis resident Cindy McReynolds, program manager of the Bruce Hammock lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, spotted some cabbage white butterfly chrysalids in her garden two weeks ago. "They were on the cabbage when I was removing the vegetation."

Colleague/collaborator Matthew Forister, McMinn professor of biology at the University of Nevada, Reno (his major professor was Shapiro), said that Shapiro's find was right on time. "You couldn't have hit closer to the trend line if you'd tried," he told him, sending him the illustration below. "This year in red," he pointed out, noting that "the slope has not changed from last year."

The cabbage white was not the only butterfly Shapiro found on Jan. 19. He also noticed a “fresh-looking female West Coast Lady, Vanessa annabella, nectaring at a crucifer in the same garden—first one of those this year too, but it's a hibernator.”

Shapiro launched the "Beer-for-a-Butterfly" contest in 1972 to draw attention to Pieris rapae and its first flight.  “Since 1972, the first flight has varied from Jan. 1 to Feb. 22, averaging about Jan. 20.” The butterfly is emerging earlier and earlier as the regional climate has warmed, said Shapiro, who researches biological responses to climate change. "The cabbage white is now emerging a week or so earlier on average than it did 30 years ago here."

The professor, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Entomological Society and the California Academy of Sciences,  said the cabbage white butterfly inhabits vacant lots, fields and gardens where its host plants, weedy mustards, grow.

Shapiro teaches his students well. The other winners were his own graduate students: Adam Porter defeated him in 1983; and Sherri Graves and Rick VanBuskirk each won in the late 1990s.

Shapiro, who is in the field more than 200 days of the year, monitoring butterflies of central California, knows where to find the cabbage whites. He has collected many of his winners in mustard patches near railroad tracks in West Sacramento, Yolo County.  Over the last seven years, five of the winners came from West Sacramento; one in Davis, Yolo County; and one in Suisun, Solano County.

Coincidentally, Shapiro caught the 2013 and 2009 winners on President Obama's Inauguration Day. This year he missed President Trump's Inauguration Day by a day.

Shapiro maintains a research website on butterflies, where he records the population trends. He and artist Tim Manolis co-authored A Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley Regions, published in 2007 by the University of California Press.

It's a moth like no other.

Did you read the abstract published Jan. 17 in the journal ZooKeys about the newly discovered and named moth, Neopalpa donaldtrumpi?

No? Well, you probably read the news story. It went viral.

Somewhat overlooked was the role that scientists at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, University of California, Davis, played. The tiny moth was part of a desert insect collection that the UC Davis researchers loaned to evolutionary biologist and systematist Vazrick Nazari of Canada.

In sifting and sorting through the Bohart specimens, the brightly colored miniscule moth drew Nazari's attention. A new species! The yellow scales on the tiny moth's head reminded him of President-Elect Donald Trump's hairstyle.

Like a moth to a flame, Nazari decided on a name:  Neopalpa donaldtrumpi.

Class: Insecta
Order: Lepidoptera
Family: Gelechiidae
Genus: Neopalpa
Species: N. donaldtrumpi

 “The reason for this choice of name is to bring wider public attention to the need to continue protecting fragile habitats in the U.S. that still contain many undescribed species,” Nazari wrote in ZooKeys.

However, the Bohart scientists weren't aware until yesterday (Jan. 18) that the moth had acquired a name, or that it would attract such media attention. Kimsey learned of the naming via an email from Nazari.

Bohart Museum associate/research entomologist Thomas "Tom" Zavortink and colleagues collected the tiny moth with the orange-yellow and brown wings in the Algodones Dunes, bordering Arizona and the Mexican state of Baja California.  Tiny? It has a wingspan of less than one centimeter.

"We surveyed the insects of the Algodones Dunes for more than six years with a contract from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management," Kimsey said. "It was a really fun/interesting project. We collected nearly 2,000 species of insects from about 200 square mile of 'sand.'  Six percent were new to science. The moth was collected in a Malaise trap in one of the washes on the east side of the dunes."

As for Zavortink, he's been a Bohart Museum associate since 2001. He's a former professor and chair of the University of  Francisco Department of Biology. His career also includes research entomologist with the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Washington, D.C. He holds a doctorate in zoology from UCLA, where he also received his master's degree.

Zavortink is known for his mosquito identification for vector/mosquito control districts, California Department of Public Health, Latin American culicidologists and professional colleagues, and his bee identification for professional colleagues. He completed and published a survey of the bees of the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, Imperial County, for the Bureau of Land Management.

One of the bees he's researched is the European wool carder bee (Anthidium manicatum), discovered in New York in 1963 and in California in 2007. (See Bug Squad.)

Naming critters for people--from citizens to celebrities to presidents to other public figures--isn't new. President Barack Obama has nine species named for him (more than any other president). His namesakes include a long-legged, resourceful Northern California spider, Aptostichus barackobamai, and a colorful spangled darner, a perchlike fish, Etheostoma obama.

Having your name associated with a new species is considered an honor, scientists say. It's a permanent legacy, unlike the names of many streets, schools, other buildings, and parks, which can be subject to removal.

But here's a good thing: if you're interested in naming an insect for you or a loved one, the Bohart Museum offers a biolegacy program. For a sponsorship of $2000 (which helps fund the museum's research program), you can select a species for naming, and receive a framed photo and documentation (publication).

The Bohart Museum scientists describe as many as 15 new species annually, and their associates, "many more," Kimsey says. "We could use your help with the selection of new species names in the course of our research."

Some of the insects ready for adoption are pictured here. For more information, email bmuseum@ucdavis.edu or call (530) 752-0493. 

Think of the ABCs: almonds, blueberries and cherries.

Then think of watermelons and pumpkins.

All those crops will be discussed in a series of free webinars on Ensuring Crop Pollination in U.S. Specialty Crops, set Jan. 24 through March 28.

The webinars will feature five researchers with the Integrated Crop Pollination Project (ICP), including ICP co-principal investigator and pollination ecologist Neal Williams of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. They are free and open to the public. Each will be 45 minutes to 60 minutes long.

Coordinating the series are Katharina Ullmann, national crop pollination specialist with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, and Extension apiculturist and professor John Skinner of the University of Tennessee. Closely linked to UC Davis, Ullmann received her doctorate in entomology from UC Davis, studying with Williams.

"The majority of U.S. specialty crop growers depend on bees for pollination of their crops," Ullmann said. "Growers know that without adequate pollination, they would not be profitable. But what are the best pollination strategies for fruit, vegetable, and nut crops? What farm management practices can growers use to support bees and the crop pollination they provide?"

First to present will be Theresa Pitts-Singer, who collaborates with Williams. She will discuss Ensuring Almond Pollination on Jan. 24 and also deliver the ending seminar on March 28 on How to Manage Solitary Orchard Bees for Crop Pollination.

Williams will speak Feb. 28 on On-Farm Pollinator Benefits for Watermelon Pollination. An associate professor of pollination and biology and a Chancellor's Fellow, Williams serves as the faculty co-director of the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center and is a member of UC Davis Agricultural Sustainability Institute.  His applied research addresses the integration of wild and managed bees for pollination of diverse agricultural crops including seed production, row crops and orchards.

His research addresses a series of questions:

• Under what contexts, in terms of local management and landscape context, can native pollinators provide sufficient pollination for different crops?  
• How can we enhance habitat and diversify agricultural systems to promote managed and wild bees?
• Do pollinators like honey bees and wild bees interact in ways to increase the overall effectiveness of crop pollination?

The answers to these questions will help alleviate the stress placed on honey bees, Williams says, and also "inform ways to more sustainability manage agricultural systems to promote biodiversity and production."

Williams has worked extensively in agro-ecosystems in California's Central Valley and in eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. His work in the East and West has helped form the basis for pollinator conservation planting guidelines. A continuing goal, he says, is to provide practical information that can be used to improve the long-term stability of pollination for agriculture in California, as well as promote pollinator conservation and management. 

All speakers will discuss their research, and engage with the audience in discussing pollination of wild bees, honey bees and other managed bees in almond, blueberry, tree fruit, pumpkin, and watermelon. Each registered attendee will later receive a link to the slides.

To register, attendees can click on each link (note that all times here are 11 a.m., Pacific Time (consult your time zone):

• Jan. 24: Ensuring Almond Pollination (Theresa Pitts-Singer, USDA-ARS and Utah State University)
• Jan. 31: Pollinating Highbush Blueberries: Bees Bring Bigger Berries (Rufus Isaacs, Michigan State University)
• Feb. 14: Pollinating Apples and Cherries East of the Rockies (Julianna Wilson, Michigan State University)
• Feb. 28: On-Farm Pollinator Benefits for Watermelon Pollination (Neal Williams, University of California, Davis)
• March 21: Ensuring Pumpkin Pollination (Shelby Fleischer, Pennsylvania State University)
• March 28: How to Manage Solitary Orchard Bees for Crop Pollination (Theresa Pitts-Singer, USDA-ARS and Utah State University)

The webinar series will be hosted by eXtension.org, an online Cooperative Extension network. Funding will be provided by the Integrated Crop Pollination Project, a USDA-NIFA Specialty Crop Research Initiative Grant (#2012-51181-20105). Plans are to offer continuing education credits for certified crop advisors.

Want more information about the series? Access the Bee Health eXtension.org website or email icpbees@msu.edu.