County fairs are filled with fun, food and festivities. They're meant to educate, inform and entertain.

What we've always loved about the county fairs: the incredible exhibits. Especially exhibits dealing with photographs and paintings of insects.

When the 68th annual Solano County Fair in Vallejo opens Wednesday, July 29 and continues through Sunday, Aug. 2, you'll see butterflies and bees (live ones!) on the grounds at 900 Fairgrounds Drive, but inside the exhibit halls, you'll see other bugs.

Take McCormack Hall. It's graced with everything from youth photographs to adult baked goods. Some of the youth photographs feature butterflies (Monarchs and a Red Admiral), praying mantids, and the always charming lady beetles, aka lady bugs.

In the adult section, Iris Mayhew of Vallejo, who acknowledges being a beginning artist, painted a Western tiger swallowtail on a decorative plate. She's hoping to get more involved in painting insects, including honey bees and dragonflies.

It's art imitating real life but she's made it her own. It was Oscar Wilde who wrote in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying that, "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life". 

Last Sunday, McCormack Hall superintendent Gloria Gonzalez and assistant superintendent Sharon Payne and assistants  Angelina Gonzalez, Julianna Payne and Iris Mayhew and her 10-year-old Ian Mayhew, all of Vallejo, were busily dressing up the hall for fairtime. They affixed best-of-show, best-of-division and blue ribbons (bragging rights) to the exhibits, transforming a once empty hall to a county celebration.

The work of the Gonzalez-Payne team will bring back memories of fairs gone by--from weathered old barns to intricately detailed quilts to patiently pickled preserves.  Yes, someone even preserved quail eggs!

It's time to round up friends and family to see what the county fair has to offer.

And quite appropriately, the theme is "Meet Me at the Fair!"

 

There is such a thing as a free lunch. And a free breakfast. And a free dinner.

And a free snack.

That is, if you're a freeloader fly.

If you've ever watched a spider snare a bee or other insect in its web, and wrap it like a fit-to-be-tied holiday present,  you've probably seen tiny little freeloader flies dining on the prey.

They are so tiny--usually 1 to 3 mm in length--that it takes a keen eye to spot them if they're not moving. The eyes are often red though "this need not be obvious because many species of the flies are small and dusky."

The close-up below is a hand-held photo taken with a Canon EOS 7D with a MPE-65mm lens.

Freeloader flies belong to the family Milichiidae. The close-up below may be in the genus Desmometopa, but it's difficult to tell by the image, says Martin Hauser, senior insect biosystematist
 with the
 Plant Pest Diagnostics, California Department of Food and Agriculture.

As it turned out, the spider dropped its prey and the freeloaders flies didn't have to leave the table. 

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
--John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

Muir said it well.

Muir (1938-1914), the naturalist and conservationist known as "The Father of Our National Parks," was the driving force behind the establishment of our national parks, including Yosemite National Park. 

But have you ever thought about what he said: ""When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe"?

In our yard, we are rearing Gulf Fritillary butterflies (Agraulis vanillae) on their host plant, the passionflower vine. The Gulf Frit is a bright orangish-reddish butterfly with silver-spangled underwings. It's a member of the family Nymphalidae and subfamily Heliconiinae.

We also consider it part of our family. The females and males mate, the females lay eggs on the passionflower vine, the eggs become caterpillars and the caterpillars become adults. That is, if the Western scrub jays and the praying mantids and the European paper wasps let them.

Lately, the caterpillars seem to be multiplying faster than the proverbial rabbits. The Western scrub jays are missing. They no longer sit on the fence and cherry-pick their prey.  Why are they MIA? Three resident juvenile Cooper's hawks (as identified by Andrew Engilis, Jr., curator of the UC Davis Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology) possess an appetite for jays (among other prey). The result: too many caterpillars on our passionflower vine. The 'cats are defoliating the plant faster than we expected.  In short, it's a veritable population crisis on our passionflower vine.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

We love the caterpillars. We love the butterflies. We love the praying mantids. And we are trying our best to love, or at least like, the wasps after hearing researcher Amy Toth of Iowa State University speak fondly of them at UC Davis. Read the 10 things we should like about wasps. Note that she's trying to popularize the hashtag, #wasplove.

Meanwhile, what about those hawks? It's hawk heaven here. We love seeing them cooling their toes, splashing around in our front-yard birdbath, and communicating with their siblings. It's a sign of the times. California's severe drought means an influx of critters, large and small, heading for urban birdbaths. In addition to hawks, our birdbath draws squirrels, doves, finches, woodpeckers, scrub jays, sparrows, crows, honey bees and even a passing wild turkey with a neck long enough to reach the water.

Lately, it's a hawk birdbath. The jays are gone. The caterpillars are thriving. 

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

Oh, what a (moth) night!

Saturday, July 18 marked the beginning of National Moth Week and the Bohart Museum of Entomology obliged with an indoor and outdoor open house, its first-ever evening open house.

The event took place from 8 to 11 p.m. The crowd marveled at the moth specimens inside the museum, and then stepped outside to check the moths flying into blacklighting and mercury vapor setup.

Like a moth to a flame...

"We saw some familiar faces, but many new ones," said Tabatha Yang, public education and outreach coordinator for the Bohart Museum, home of nearly eight million insect specimens. 

It was "getaway weekend" for a mother-daughter team. They booked room reservations a Davis hotel, and did some shopping. Then it was Moth Night. "The daughter, a high school sophomore, came here for the 4-H Field Day this spring," Yang noted. Keenly interested in entomology, the teenager decided the Bohart open house "was a good reason for her to come back."

Another teenage visitor was in a Tech Trek (a STEM outreach event for junior high girls) and brought her family to the open house. 

Highlights of Moth Night included:

• Entomologist and Bohart associate Jeff Smith of Rocklin demonstrating Lepitodera preparation using material that entomologist Fran Keller recently brought back from Belize.
• "Moth Man" John DeBenedictis of Davis and Bohart senior museum scientist Steve Heydon showing the crowd the moths flying into the blacklighting and mercury vapor lighting setup.
• Bohart associate Greg Kareofelas of Davis guiding guests through the moth collection

Also helping were volunteers Maia Lundy, Fran Keller, Wade Spencer, Laura Morgan, Alex Nguyen, Melissa Cruz, Joel Hernandez, James Heydon, Anita Pratap, and Maria Nansen with daughters Miriam, 15, Emma, 12, and Molly, 6.  Their father is a UC Davis entomologist. The sisters helped the visitors create buttons.

The event wrapped up "the very successful 10 weekend events we hosted this past academic year," Yang noted. "Stay tuned for the 2015-2016 Bohart 0pen Huse schedule to be announced later in August."

The museum is directed by Lynn Kimsey, professor of entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.