To bee or not to bee?

That was not the question. There was no question. The answer was "yes" before the event began.

When visiting bee scientist Jakub Gabka of Warsaw, Poland, studied at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis last summer with noted bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey, she held a bee beard event for the Laidlaw crew.

Gabka struck this pose--which graces the cover of the current edition of  American Bee Journal.

How did it feel? It’s heavy, it's hot, and it tickles, he said.

Cobey, now a bee researcher at Washington State University (she also teaches queen bee insemination classes and queen bee rearing classes), loves doing bee beard events.

It’s an educational and entertaining activity best done in the spring when the nectar flow is heavy, when the temperatures are optimum, and when the bees “are fat and happy,” she says.

You do not want to try this at home. Only beekeepers should do this, and with a seasoned bee beard coordinator. Proper knowledge, preparations and training of the bees are crucial.  A novice, unaccustomed to being around bees, might freak out. Literally.

“The fact that honey bees are venomous insects with the ability to sting when threatened, must be respected,” Cobey says.

Cobey has organized bee beard venues at a number of places, including Ohio State University’s Rothenbuhler Honey Bee Laboratory and the Laidlaw facility (her former workplaces), and in Washington state, where she and her husband, Tim Lawrence, a county Extension director, now reside. (See her research lecture, "Enhancing Genetic Diversity in the U.S. Honey Bee Gene Pool" on the Lewis County (Wash.) Beekeepers' Association website), along with more bee beard photos.)

Beekeepers are passionate about their fascination with honey bees, Cobey acknowledges. "The ultimate beekeeping experience is getting intimate with bees and literally looking a bee in the eye."

Cobey will be writing a "how to" piece on bee bearding in the near future.

Meanwhile, if a photo is worth a thousand words, what is a photo of thousands of bees on your head worth?

Priceless.

No, it's not a honey bee.

But many people think all floral visitors are bees.

It's a fly. A drone fly.

Family:  Syrphidae;  subfamily Eristalinae; tribe Eristalini; genus, Eristalis. Like all syrphids, it has two wings. The honey bee has four.

In its larval stage, the drone fly is known as a rat-tailed maggot. You'll see it in stagnant water, floating in ditches, ponds and drains. It feeds on stagnant rotting organic material.

We spotted this drone fly last Sunday sipping nectar on our bulbine (Bulbine frutescens). The plant is known as a bulbine, typically meaning a bulbous plant, but Bulbine frutescens has no bulb.

The drone fly, a pollinator, glittered in the late afternoon sun as it headed for the bulbine.

Then came the "drone strike"--on the nectar!

Jay Evans

It's a topic we've all been waiting for: "Honey Bee Health and Disease Resistance."

Jay Evans, a research entomologist with the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) Beltsville Bee Research Laboratory for the past 14 years, will discuss "Bee Disease Resistance and Colony Health" on Wednesday, Oct. 2  to  open the fall seminar series hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

His lecture, open to all interested persons, is from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in Room 122 of Briggs Hall, located on Kleiber Hall Drive, UC Davis campus.

"Honey bees are vulnerable to poor nutrition, parasites and pathogens, and exposure to chemicals," Evans said. "These threats can occur in batches and little is known about the impacts of multiple challenges to honey bee health, and about the abilities of bees to fend off these threats. I will present recent work aimed at determining the impacts of multiple parasites on bee health. I will also discuss the impacts Varroa mites, chemicals, and bacterial symbionts on bee health and colony losses."

As a research entomologist, Evans has focused his projects on a range of bee pests including bacteria, fungi, viruses and, mites, and beetles. He is especially interested in the immune defenses of bees toward these threats. 

Evans was an early proponent of the Honey Bee Genome Project and helped recruit and organize scientists interested in applied genomics for bees.  He has improved and applied genetic screens for possible causes of colony collapse disorder and is now heading a consortium to sequence the genome of the Varroa mite in order to develop novel control methods for this key pest.

Evans holds a bachelor's degree in biology from Princeton and a doctorate in biology from the University of Utah.

The fall seminars, coordinated by faculty members Joanna Chiu and Brian Johnson, will be held every Wednesday noon through Dec. 11 in 122 Briggs Hall, except for Nov. 27, Thanksgiving Week, when no seminar will be held.

Under the coordination of professor James R. Carey, all seminars are to be videotaped and posted at a later date on UCTV.

Anyone with a computer can view the seminars, and yes, they're free.

The news is not good.

Scores of Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) are now migrating toward their overwintering zone in Mexico but they're doing so in dwindling numbers. 

"Monarch butterflies appear headed for a perhaps unprecedented population crash, according to scientists and monarch watchers who have been keeping tabs on the species in their main summer home in Eastern and Central North America," wrote reporter Daniel Schwartz of CBC News in a Sept. 24 news article.

"There had been hope that on their journey north from their overwintering zone in Mexico, the insects' numbers would build through the generations, but there's no indication that happened."

We spotted six Monarchs nectaring on lantana on Sept. 14 in south Vacaville. "I think the numbers are up regionally, but I've seen no breeding at all in the Central Valley," said butterfly expert Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis. "They bred like mad in Nevada this year."

Shapiro writes on his butterfly monitoring website: "The Monarch overwinters on the central coast and moves inland, typically in early March."

In his book, The Handy Bug Answer Book, entomologist Gilbert Waldbauer, professor emeritus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, points out that Monarchs are the most famous of the "insect migrants that make a return trip."

Which begs the question: "Do the overwintering monarchs in Mexico feed?" Responds  Waldbauer: "Practically none of them feed. On warm days, they leave the trees to drink water, but the few flowers near the overwintering sites are sucked dry of nectar by the first few monarchs that find them."

They survive, he writes, "on large stores of energy-rich body fat that they acquired as they migrated south. On average, their bodies consist of about 50 percent fat. Their fat supply lasts through the winter because, inactive in the cold climate of the high mountains, they use up very little energy."