Caterpillar about to turn into a chrysalis. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

They made it through the winter: the bitter cold with subfreezing temperatures;  the 54-day drought (will it ever rain again?) and the heavy rain that caught us thinking about ark-building.

Butterfly expert Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, was among those concerned about whether the Gulf Fritillaries (Agraulis vanillae) would be able to survive the winter in this area.

They did. And they are.

Shapiro spotted the "signs of life" in the City of Davis (Yolo County) and the City of Vacaville (Solano County). Naturalist/butterfly enthusiast Greg Kareofela, a volunteer at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, has also seen  them in Davis.

The ones pictured in this blog we found near downtown Vacaville last Monday, Feb. 17, on a passionflower vine (Passiflora): two adults and half a dozen caterpillars. Empty chrysalids, and a few viable chrysalids, plus seed pods from the Passilfora, hung from the branches.

The showy reddish-orange butterfly continues to make a comeback in the Sacramento-Davis area. In the early 1970s, it was considered extinct in that area.

“It first appeared in the vicinity of San Diego in the 1870s,” Shapiro told us. "It spread through Southern California in urban settings and was first recorded in the Bay Area about 1908. It became a persistent breeding resident in the East and South Bay in the 1950s and has been there since.”

An empty chrysalis. Nobody home. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

Shapiro describes the Gulf Fritillary as  “one of the most widespread weedy butterflies in the Americas." However, he points out, it has no “native host plant in California." 

Those who want to attract the Gulf Frit can do so by planting its host plant, passionflower vine (tropical genus Passiflora).

If you'd like to learn more about butterflies, ecological communities, and the science of conservation, be sure to attend Art Shapiro's talk at noon on Monday, March 24 at the Commonwealth Club, 595 Market St., San Francisco. His topic is "Ecological Communities and the March of Time."

This program is part of Commonwealth Club's “The Science of Conservation and Biodiversity in the 21st Century," according to spokersperson Chisako Ress (chisakoress@gmail.com). This series of lectures is aimed at presenting a new way of looking at public policy issues in conservation. The things we've assumed as facts often are not, she noted.  Traditional approaches are losing ground as science illuminates new pathways for framing and achieving conservation goals.

From the Commonwealth Club website: "Ecological communities as we know them are similar to freeze-frames from a long movie. Associations among species are very dynamic on millennial scales, as demonstrated by the evidence since deglaciation 15,000 years ago. Coevolution of species occurs locally in geographic mosaics and can be extremely dynamic as well. Frederic Clements, the father of American community ecology, had a holistic vision. He saw communities as super-organisms. He was wrong."

You can use this coupon code "friendsforshapiro" to get a discount, Ress said.  For program detail and registration, access  http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2014-03-24/arthur-m-shapiro-ecological-communities-and-march-time.

Following Shapiro's talk, the next speaker is another UC faculty member; this time it will be Joe McBride of UC Berkeley:

Almond tree in bloom at the Laidlaw facility. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

Mine--well, it's not exactly mine!--is on the grounds of the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road, University of California, Davis.

It's spectacular in bloom. You can hear the buzz of honey bees, the tweeting of birds, and occasionally, an airplane droning over the field or a hog squealing from the nearby UC Davis hog farm.

But the sounds of the bees empower us and assure us that spring is coming. This particular almond tree, with its low hanging branches,  is an addiction and a good place to get "a fix."

Meanwhile, 1.6 million honey bee colonies, trucked in from all over the United States, are pollinating California's 810,000 acres of almonds. Each acre requires two bee hives. 

California growers produced 1.88 billion pounds of almonds for the 2012-13 crop year, according to Christine Souza's Dec. 11, 2013 article in Ag Alert.   The 2013-14 crop is estimated at 1.85 billion pounds.

A little less than last year but that's a lot of almonds! And a lot of buzz in the almonds...

Instrumental insemination. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

Cobey, former manager of the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, University of California, Davis, and now with Washington State University (WSU),  is an international authority on instrumental insemination. She's perfected and taught the specialized technique of instrumental insemination for more than three decades. 

Based on Whidbey Island, Wash., Cobey maintains the New World Carniolan Closed Population Breeding Program, now in its 32rd generation. Her  independent research program focuses on the post-insemination maintenance of queens and the selection of behavioral traits at the colony level. 

Cobey currently coordinates the WSU collaborative stock improvement and  maintenance program, partnering with California queen producers.  A focus is the incorporation of germplasm (sperm) collected from Old World European honey bees into domestic breeding stocks to enhance U.S. honey bees. Much has been written about the germplasm repository established at WSU.

The recipient  of numerous honors and awards, Cobey presents her work nationally and internationally at numerous conferences and seminars, and publishes extensively in trade journals and professional peer-reviewed publications. Her credentials include the former management of several bee research labs, including those at UC Davis and Ohio State University.  She has also worked at the USDA Honey Bee Lab, Baton Rouge, and in commercial queen production in Florida and  California.  Cobey studied with Harry H. Laidlaw Jr., for whom the UC Davis research facility is named. She founded and operated a queen production business, Vaca Valley Apiaries, in northern California (Vacaville, Solano County).

George Washington, Portrait by Gilbert Stuart (Courtesy, Wikipedia)

Historians agree that the infamous story about George Washington cutting down his father's favorite cherry tree and then admitting it ("I cannot tell a lie") is probably just that--a story. A myth. Didn't happen.

At age 6, George Washington reportedly got a little hatchet-happy and started chopping down every thing in sight. At least that's what biographer Parson Weems wrote in telling a story supposedly related to him by an elderly woman, maybe a cousin, maybe a neighbor, maybe not.  Historians say there's no proof young George did that; and that Weems made up the story, later printed in a McGuffey Reader, to encourage children to always tell the truth.

So there you have it: Weems made up the story to get young children to always tell the truth. 

As we all know, young George Washington (Feb. 22, 1732-Dec. 14, 1799) went on to become the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, 1775–1783, and then the founding president of the United States, serving from 1789 until 1797.

We don't know much about George Washington's early life, but we do know that as an adult, he kept bees--bees that pollinated his fruit trees, including apples, pears, plums, and cherries.  We do know that honey bees were here 110 years before young George was born; European colonists brought the honey bee to America (to the Jamestown colony, Virginia) in 1622.

Some tall tales also exist about bees during the American Revolutionary War. According to a fictional story first published in the Sunday School Advocate and then reprinted in the September 1917 in the American Bee Journal, 12-year-old beekeeper Charity Crabtree was tending her father's bees when she encountered a wounded soldier who told her to ride his horse to Gen. Washington's camp, just outside Philadelphia, and warn him about the impending attack by Gen. Charles Cornwallis.

However, before she could ride off, the British surrounded her and yelled 
“Ho, there! Stop, girl, or by heaven we'll make you!”

The story continues: "Suddenly, with the entrance of the soldiers, the bees began to buzz with a cannon's roar, as if to say, 'Here we are, Charity! Didn't Washington say we were patriots, too? Just give us a chance to defend our country!'

"Like lightning, now, Charity bent from her saddle, and seizing a stout stick, she wheeled around to the outer side of the hedge that protected the hives like a low wall. Then, with a smart blow, she beat each hive until the bees clouded the air. Realizing from experience that bees always follow the thing that hits them rather than the person who directs it, she threw the stick full force at her pursuers.

"As Charity galloped off at high speed she heard the shouts of fury from the soldiers, who fought madly against the bees. And, of course, the harder they fought, the harder they were stung. If they had been armed with swords the brave bees could not have kept the enemy more magnificently at bay.

"While Charity was riding furiously miles away, down the pike, past the bridge, over the hill, right into Washington's camp, her would-be pursuers lay limply in the dust—their noses swollen like powder horns. When the little maid finally gained admission to Washington's tent, for to none other would she trust her secret, the great general stared at her gray dress torn to ribbons, her kerchief draggled with mud and her gold hair loosened by the wind. But Charity had no time for ceremony."

Charity delivered the message about the the two attacks: the pending British attack and the bee attack. At that point, George Washington praised Charity's bees for saving the country.

Said George: "It is well done, Little Miss Crabtree...Neither you nor your bees shall be forgotten when our country is at peace again. It was the cackling geese that saved Rome, but the bees saved America.”

George Washington never said that, either.

He did, however, go on to rear bees at his Mount Vernon estate.