- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Quick! Find the damselfly!
This damselfly (below) is so camouflaged that it's difficult to see her.
Her? She's a female Argia vivida, as identified by Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology at UC Davis; and dragonfly/damselfly/butterfly aficionado Greg Kareofelas, a volunteer at the Bohart Museum.
The males are a bright blue.
We didn't see both genders, though, when we were looking for damselflies in a bed of Spanish lavender last weekend in Benicia.
Argia "is a genus of damselflies of the family Coenagrionidae and of the subfamily Argiinae," according to Wikipedia. "It is a diverse genus which contains about 114 species and many more to be described. It is also the largest genus in Argiinae. They are found in the Western Hemisphere."
Like their cousins, the dragonflies, they're predators that eat other insects.
Argia vivida are known as "dancers" because of "the distinctive jerky form of flight they use which contrasts with the straightforward direct flight of bluets, forktails and other pond damselflies," according to Wikipedia. "They are usually to be seen in the open where they catch flying insects on the wing rather than flying about among vegetation picking off sedentary prey items. They tend to land and perch flat on the ground, logs and rocks. When perched, they usually hold their wing slightly raised above the abdomen."
That's what this one was doing.
/span>/span>- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Who wouldn't like to have a lady beetle, aka ladybug?
Although they're commonly called "ladybugs," entomologists call them "lady beetles." That's because they're beetles, not bugs.
Nevertheless, who wouldn't like to have one?
The California Grange traditionally gives away lady beetles at the annual California Ag Day, held around the first day of spring on the west lawn of the state capitol. These beneficial insects gorge on aphids and other soft-bodied insects.
We took ours home and placed one on a Iceland poppy stem and another on a rose bush.
And then we photographed them as a sort of "proof of life." Out of the container and into the garden. Go get 'em, lady beetles!
Lady beetles belong to the family Coccinellidae, derived from the Latin word coccineus, which means "scarlet." However, not all lady beetles are red. Some are red, yellow, black, gray, or brown. Some have spots or stripes. Some have no markings at all.
They're sometimes confused with the spotted cucumber beetle, a yellowish green dome-shaped insect with black spots, but that one is a pest.
If you want your own lady beetles, you can usually buy them at a hardware store. Or on Saturday, April 18, you can stop by Briggs Hall during the annual UC Davis Picnic Day and receive free lady beetles from the UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM). (You can also engage in maggot art, cockroach races, termite trails, honey tasting, and other fun activities that the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology is planning.)
As for the lady beetles, we're promised more. Last week we received a special gift--a cluster of 24 eggs deposited on our passion flower vine (Passiflora).
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
She's the beekeeper/graduate student at Harvard's Graduate School of Design who traveled through almond orchards in California's Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys in May 2014 to illustrate and pen a book about the spatial relationship between honey bees and almonds.
We wrote about her in a Feb. 11th Bug Squad blog.
The book, "Almond and the Bee," is now a reality. See http://blur.by/1CmYr3h. She's offering the book at cost ($9) and donating about $2 from the sale of each book to benefit the bees. The benefactor will be either the Xerces Society or Project Apis m.
Stephanie, a master of landscape architecture candidate who keeps bees on the rooftop of her school building, shared her marvelous 46-page digital story, http://almondandbee.com, with us earlier this year.
"I was inspired to create socially engaging and ecological performative places and hope to bring my passion for enhancing natural systems to the urban environment," she told us. "As a designer, I developed an interest in pollination during my second semester at the Harvard Graduate School of Design--I used the idea of pollination to attract people and pollinators to a park redesign, and developed a planting palette and a promenade that would do so."
Stephanie received a grant to finance her project. She spent a week in "almond country," meeting with experts at UC Berkeley and UC Davis, the Almond Board, the Blue Diamond Cooperative, beekeepers, almond growers, and almond growers/beekeepers.
Pollination ecologist Neal Williams, associate professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, was among those who sat down with her and talked almonds and bees. He filled her on his research and offered tips on people to meet and places to see.
"The shape of the project developed during my fall 2014 semester," she related. "I thought an illustrated story would allow me to combine my photographs, maps, and drawings, with found historical images in an engaging and accessible form...The story is about how that came to be, but it's also an argument for holistic thinking in agriculture that could be both cultural and economically significant."
Two key sentences on the first page of http://almondandbee.com beckon the reader: "The almond and the bee. The spatial relationship of the orchard, bee, and dwelling through time."
Almonds and bees need each other, she points out. California has more than 900,000 acres of almonds, and each acre requires two colonies for pollination. And every year some 1.6 million colonies, or approximately 60 percent of the nation's colonies, are trucked to California.
"The relationship between almond growers and migratory beekeepers are in many ways analogous to that of the fruit tree and the bee—one is sedentary and one is mobile, but both depend on one another," Stephanie writes.
In her book, she traces the modern history of the honey bee, touches on traditional beekeeping methods, mentions the invention of the Langsroth hive in 1851, and takes a peek at the future of beekeeping and almond orchards.
In February 2015 we described it as "an informative, creative and well-designed (digital) story." Now it's March 2015 and it's 'an informative, creative and well-designed book," with proceeds aimed at helping our troubled honey bees.
Well done, Stephanie!
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
If you want to learn about malaria and the exciting new research underway, be sure to set aside Friday, April 24.
It's the fourth annual Bay Area World Malaria Day Symposium, co-hosted by the University of California, Davis, and Zagaya, a non-profit organization that envisions a malaria-free world.
The event, open to the public, will take place from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the Clark Kerr campus, University of California, Berkeley. Keynote speaker is Patrick Duffy, chief of the National Institutes of Health's Laboratory of Malaria Immunology and Vaccinology. Duffy is an internationally recognized expert in human malaria pathogenesis, malaria in pregnancy, and malaria vaccine development. He has published more than 100 papers on malaria over his nearly 25-year career.
Malaria is a life-threatening disease caused by parasites, which are transmitted through the bites of infected mosquitoes. The statistics continue to be alarming. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated last December 2014 that about 198 million cases of malaria occurred in 2013. Every minute a child in Africa dies from malaria. WHO estimated that malaria deaths in 2013 totaled 584,000 deaths worldwide. However, malaria mortality rates among children in Africa has dropped an estimated 58 percent since 2000, thanks to increased malaria prevention and control measures.
In addition, members of the Luckhart lab, including Jose Pietri, Lizzy Glennon, Lattha Souvannaseng, and Nazzy Pakpour, will present their research at the meeting.
"The event will provide significant opportunities for networking for our trainees and for spending a day thinking about we can make a difference to eliminating one the greatest global health crises of our time," Luckhart said.
James R. Carey, distinguished professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and Cecilia Giulivi, professor, Department of Molecular Biosciences, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, "will be presenting on innovative applications of their expertise to malaria research," Luckhart announced.
Other UC Davis campus faculty attending the meeting will include Renee Tsolis of the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, UC Davis School of Medicine, and her lab; and Koen Van Rompay, director of the Diagnostics Laboratory, California National Primate Research Center, UC Davis.
The daylong event will conclude with a gala reception hosted by the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), a global public health non-profit founded in 1977 with significant interests in malaria and more than 1200 employees in 30 offices across the world.
Zagaya, directed by Kay Monroe, is a Bay Area-non profit that envisions a malaria-free world created through education, innovative vector control, effective vaccines, better water management and safer pesticides, and access to the highest quality anti-malarials available.
The symposium is open to the public, and registration is underway. See Bay Area World Malaria Day Symposium. General admission is $50, and student admission (with identification) is $25. Registration includes breakfast and lunch. In addition, attendees are invited to donate funds for bednets in Africa. The donations will go to Nothing But Nets, one of the World Malaria Day partners.
Map: http://p2sl.berkeley.edu/maps/DirectionsToCKC.pdf
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The vibrant colors of Cosmos, an annual flower with the same common name as its genus, are spectacular. But we especially like the showstopping pink Cosmos with its bright yellow center.
Well, sometimes, they have a green center--that's when an ultra green sweat bee is foraging.
The female Agapostemon texanus is solid green, from head to thorax to abdomen, while the male of the species has a solid green head and thorax. It begs to differ with its abdomen; it's striped yellow and black, as if an artist ran out of green paint.
Agapostemon texanus is one of the bees featured in California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists, the work of UC Berkeley-affiliated scientists Gordon W. Frankie, Robbin W. Thorp, Rollin E. Coville, and Barbara Ertter. Thorp, a distinguished emeritus professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, received his doctorate in entomology from UC Berkeley, so there's the Berkeley angle!
If you want to learn more about native bees, check out Native Bees Are a Rich Natural Resource in Urban California Gardens, published by Frankie, Thorp, Coville and Ertter (and others) in California Agriculture.
Another good source is the UC Berkeley Urban Bee Lab, directed by Professor Frankie. It has an easy to remember URL: http://www.helpabee.org/.
Meanwhile, how green is your Cosmos?