- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
We've all read stories dealing with "A Day in the Life" of principals, presidents and princesses. We're probably familiar with The Beatles' song "A Day in the Life," the final song on their Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album.
But do you know what's it's like to be a queen bee for a day? A virgin queen bee?
You will if you attend the Wednesday, Feb. 3 seminar by Extension apiculturist/professor David Tarpy of North Carolina State University on Wednesday, Feb. 3 in 122 Briggs Hall, Kleiber Hall Drive, UC Davis. He will speak on "Young Regality: a Day in the Life of a Virgin Queen Bee" from 12:10 to 1 p.m. It's part of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology's noonhour seminars and is open to all interested persons. It also will be recorded for later posting on UCTV.
His host is Elina Niño, Extension apiculturist, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
Tarpy, a honey bee biologist, joined the North Carolina State University faculty in 2003. He received his bachelor's degree in biology in 1993 from Hobart College; his master's degree in biology (advised by David Fletcher) in 1995 from Bucknell University; and his doctorate in entomology in 2000 from UC Davis, with major professor Robert Page, former chair of the Department of Entomology and now university provost emeritus and Foundation chair of Life Sciences, Arizona State University.
Tarpy went on to complete his postdoctoral fellowship (advised by Tom Seeley) at Cornell University, New York.
Tarpy focuses his research on the biology and behavior of honey bee queens—using techniques including field manipulations, behavioral observation, instrumental insemination, and molecular genetics—in order to better improve the overall health of queens and their colonies.
Specific research projects include understanding the effect of the polyandrous mating strategy of queen bees on colony disease resistance, using molecular methods to determine the genetic structure within honey bee colonies, and the determining the regulation of reproduction at the individual and colony levels.
Tarpy's work has provided some of the best empirical evidence that multiple mating by queens confers multiple and significant benefits to colonies through increased genetic diversity of their nestmates.
More recently, his lab has focused on the reproductive potential of commercially produced queens, testing their genetic diversity and mating success in an effort to improve queen quality. He recently worked with the California Bee Breeders' Association, headquartered in Orland. Many of the bee breeders sent him queen bees to be tested.
He wrote a piece for North Carolina Extension on why honey bee colonies are dying.
For further information on his seminar, contact Niño at elnino@ucdavis.edu. While in the area, Tarpy also plans to address the Marin County Beekeepers' Association on Thursday, Feb.4.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
And he wasn't even looking for it.
A UC Davis graduate student won the “Beer for a Butterfly” contest by collecting the first cabbage white butterfly of the year Saturday morning, Jan. 16 outside his home in West Davis.
Jacob Montgomery, a master's student in ecology, said he was walking out of his home around 10:30, heading for the Farmers' Market, when he spotted the cabbage white butterfly perched on his lavender.
“It was cold and rainy and the butterfly's wings looked bent like it had just hatched,” Montgomery said. “It was not difficult to catch. I picked it up by hand…I had been aware of the contest but not actively searching for the butterflies. It was completely opportunistic.”
Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology who has sponsored the contest since 1972 as part of his four-decade study of climate and butterfly seasonality, identified it as a female with a damaged forewing.
Shapiro awards a pitcher of beer, or the equivalent, for the first cabbage white of the year found in the three-county area of Sacramento, Yolo and Solano. Montgomery collected his prize, Great White beer, on Tuesday night at The Graduate.
The two shared beer and talked butterflies.
The cabbage white (Pieris rapae) probably eclosed or hatched around 7:30 that morning, said Shapiro, who has earlier predicted that the first butterfly of 2016 would be collected in mid-January.
Shapiro's former graduate student, Matt Forister, an associate professor at the University of Nevado, Reno, plots the first-flight dates and also predicted it would be found about now.
Montgomery's catch means that “now we should be seeing more and more of them after three to five days,” Shapiro said.
The UC Davis student studies plankton production dynamics in the delta and how plankton function as a food source for fishes. “More specifically, how do hydrodynamics, land management practices and slough geomorphology contribute to aquatic productivity and influence abundance and distribution of plankton?”
This makes only the fourth time that Shapiro, who is out in the field more than 200 times a year, has been defeated. His graduate student Adam Porter defeated him in 1983; and his graduate students Sherri Graves and Rick VanBuskirk each won in the late 1990s.
“I sort of consider this is a liberation because now I don't have to look for it every time the sun comes out in January—now I can relax,” Shapiro said. “Jacob's win shows that the contest isn't rigged,” he said, smiling. “Some think the contest is all a sham.”
“If this starts happening every year like this, that's when I should retire,” quipped Shapiro, who turned 70 last week.
Shapiro says the cabbage white is “typically one of the first butterflies to emerge in late winter. “Since 1972, the first flight has varied from Jan. 1 to Feb. 22, averaging about Jan. 20.”
Although the first flight of the cabbage white has been as late as Feb. 22, it is emerging earlier and earlier as the regional climate has warmed, the professor said. “There have been only two occasions in the 21st century in which it has come out this late: Jan. 26, 2006 and Jan 31, 2011.”
Shapiro won the 2015 contest by netting a cabbage white at 12:30 p.m.. Monday, Jan. 26 in West Sacramento, Yolo County. The site: a mustard patch near the railroad tracks.
Shapiro does long-term studies of butterfly life cycles and climate. "Such studies are especially important to help us understand biological responses to climate change,” he said. “The cabbage white is now emerging a week or so earlier on average than it did 30 years ago here."
Shapiro, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Entomological Society and the California Academy of Sciences, maintains a website on butterflies at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/, where he records the population trends he monitors in Central California. 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.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
You're in luck.
The UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center is hosting an educational honey tasting on Wednesday night, Jan. 27 in the Sensory Theater of the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science on Old Davis Road. If you'd like to enroll, you need to register today (Monday, Jan. 20), To register, access this site.
The event, conducted by Amina Harris, director of the Honey and Pollination Center, will take place from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. and will feature California honeys. Extension apiculturist Elina Niño of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology will talk about bees, honey and beekeeping.
Harris calls the event "a unique tasting experience, complemented with a short lecture delving into related beekeeping practices and issues." The cost is $30 (general), $25 (UC Davis affiliates), $12.50 (students).
The Honey Flavor Wheel production involved six months of research and development. “We brought together a group of 20 people--trained tasters, beekeepers and food enthusiasts--who worked together with a sensory scientist to come up with almost 100 descriptors,” Harris recently said. “This wheel will prove invaluable to those who love honey and want to celebrate its nuances.”
"Honey is honey, it's just that simple," according to the National Honey Board. "A bottle of pure honey contains the natural sweet substance produced by honey bees from the nectar of plants or secretions of living parts of plants. Nothing else." The 60,000 or so bees in a hive may "collectively travel as much as 55,000 miles and visit more than two million flowers to gather enough nectar to make just a pound of honey!"
The United States is home to more than 300 unique kinds of honey, according to the National Honey Board. Among the most popular? Clover and orange blossom.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's good for the drought and it's good for the rain beetles.
If you've never seen a rain beetle (genus Pleocoma) no worries. Most people haven't, either. You have to be in the right place at the right time, which amounts to being in a fall or winter rainstorm in their habitat before sunrise or just after sunset. And you have to work quickly. The males can fly only a couple of hours before they die. The females are flightless.
We saw our first--and last--rain beetles back in October of 2012 when a graduate student in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology showed us several that a friend had been collected in the Shenandoah Valley of Plymouth, Amador County.
What intriguing insects! They spend most of their lives in immature stages beneath the ground, and that can total a decade or more, scientists estimate. The adults surface when the ground is soaked.
You'll never seen adult beetles eat because they don't. They have no mouthparts or digestive tracts. They rely on the fat stored from their larval stage.
The females emit a pheromone so the males can locate them. It's a hurry-hurry-hurry scenario. Arthur Evans and James Hogue, authors of Introduction to California Beetles (University of California Press, Berkeley) say that “on average, males of some rain beetles have only enough energy stored as fat to give them about two hours of air time and live only a few days. The more sedentary females require less energy and may live for months after fall and winter storms.”
In California, "Pleocoma is found only in foothill and mountain habitats, never on the valley floor that I know of,” Lynn Kimsey director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology at UC Davis, told us. “A lot of the populations have been extirpated by housing developments. When I was a kid living in the Berkeley Hills in El Cerrito we had lots of males flying after every rain but once the neighborhood was built up they vanished.”
“California's rain beetles occur throughout the mountainous regions of the state, except in the deserts,” according to Evans and Hogue. Their excerpt on rain beetles is published on the website of the Hastings Natural History Reservation in Carmel, Monterey County. “Small, isolated populations also occur in the Sacramento Valley and the coastal plain of San Diego County. The known modern distribution of these apparently ancient beetles is restricted by the flightless females and is more or less correlated to areas of land that have never been subjected to glaciation or inundation by inland seas during the last two or three million years.”
As underground larvae, these insects feed on shrub and tree roots, fungi and other organic matter. Larvae can be pests when they attack the roots of apple, pear and other orchard trees.
Evans and Hogue describe the rain beetles as “large, robust, and shiny.”
And hairy. Indeed, Pleocoma is Greek for abundant hair.
“The thick layer of hair covering the undersides," they write, "is remarkably ineffective as insulation, especially for flying or rapidly crawling males who must maintain high body temperatures in cold, damp weather….the thick pile probably functions to protect both sexes from abrasion as they burrow through the soil. Males and females dig with powerful, rake-like legs and a V-shaped scoop mounted on the front of the head.”
“In most species of rain beetles, male activity is triggered by weather conditions that accompany sufficient amounts of fall or winter rainfall or snowmelt in late winter or early spring. Depending upon circumstances, males may take to the air at dawn or at dusk, or they may fly during evening showers. Others are encountered flying late in the morning on sunny days following a night of pouring rains, or during heavy snowmelt.”
Evans and Hogue say the males fly low to the ground searching for females. They are often attracted to lights (including porch lights) and pools of water. “Females crawl back down their burrows and may wait up to several months for their eggs to mature. The female eventually lays 40 to 50 eggs in a spiral pattern at the end of the burrow as much as 3 m (10 ft) below the surface. The eggs hatch in about two months.”
You can also find more information on these fascinating insects on Wikipedia, BugGuide.net, Washington State University, and YouTube, including:
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
But when the temperature hits a sunny 55, look for them.
It's winter in the UC Davis Arboretum, 11 weeks until spring.
Last Saturday we spotted a few bees foraging in the bush mallow and rosemary. Hello, strangers!
There were more bicyclists than bees. There were more birds than bees. Indeed, on some days there are more otters than bees.
If you're interested in volunteering at the 100-acre UC Davis Arboretum, and becoming a part of the gardening or land stewardship teams, the deadline to submit your application is Friday, Jan. 15. Volunteerism is a way of giving back, learning new skills, and meeting new people. Check out the Arboretum volunteer recruitment website or if you have questions, contact Roxanne Loe at (530) 752-4880 or rgloe@ucdavis.edu.
Gardening volunteers work in teams on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday mornings to help maintain and beautify Arboretum and Public Garden landscapes, according to the Arboretum officials. Each team focuses on a different area; volunteers work in collaboration with horticultural staff. The training dates are Thursdays, Jan. 28-March 3, from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.
The land stewardship teams work on the Putah Creek Riparian Reserve and campus naturalized lands with staff on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday mornings. Projects include light construction, trail repair, native plant care, weed control, and a variety of equipment and power tool operation. Training dates are Jan. 26, 27 or 28, from 9 a.m. to12 p.m.
Meanwhile, as the season changes, expect more bees than bicyclists, more bees than birds, and definitely more bees than otters.
And don't forget the human-equivalent of worker bees. The Arboretum staff and volunteers make it all happen.