What's for lunch?

If you're a lady beetle (aka ladybug), a good bet is you'll have one of those yummy, plant-sucking aphids. In fact, you'll eat your fill.  Please do.

Today we walked behind the Life Sciences Building on the UC Davis campus and encountered scores of our polka-dotted, six-legged, dome-shaped buddies hunting for prey.

It was easy pickings.

This was a fast predator in a slow food movement.

Aphids were everywhere on the brittlebush (Encelia farinosa). 

Call lady beetles what you will. Ladybirds. Lady beetles. Ladybugs. Coccinelles. Beneficial insects. All of the above.

Most people in America, however, know this insect as a "ladybug." It's actually not a true bug but a beetle. It's a member of the Coccinellidae family. Coccinelid is Latin for "scarlet," but not all lady beetles are scarlet with black spots. Some are yellow, orange and brown, and some with spots and some without.

You'll find coccinellids worldwide as there are more than 5,000 species, and of that number, more than 450 are native to North America, according to Wikipedia. 

And they all "do lunch" with aphids, scales and other soft-bodied insects. 

UC Davis entomology major Alex Nguyen, a third-year student, gets "parasitized." (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

Among the many activities at their recent "Snuggle Bugs" open house was a "mite/art station." Visitors were given a paper plate and invited to draw a mite, or other parasitic critter, and then attach the plate to an unsuspecting host.

Alex Nguyen, a third-year entomology student at UC Davis, managed to get most of the mites..er plates. Maybe it was because he was wearing a UC Davis Graduate Students' Association t-shirt lettered with "Entomology's Most Wanted." Or maybe the crowd saw him as a virtual parasitic pincushion.

"if you were a honey bee," the Bohart Museum sign at the mite table read, "this plate would be about the size of a varroa mite on you." 

The Bohart Museum, directed by Lynn Kimsey, UC Davis professor of entomology, is the home of nearly eight million insect specimens, plus a live "petting zoo" that includes Madasgascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks, rose-haired tarantula, millipedes and praying mantids. Located in Room  1124of the Academic Surge building on Crocker Lane, the insect museum is open to the public Monday through Thursday throughout the year (except on holidays).  

Next event? On Saturday, Jan. 25, the Bohart staff and volunteers will travel to the InsectFest at the World of Wonders (WOW) Museum, Lodi, to showcase their insects.

The Bohart's next weekend "home" event is Saturday, Feb. 8, which is the annual  UC Davis Biodiversity Day.

Six biological museums will be included in the campuswide event. You'll see the open collections of the Bohart Museum of Entomology, the Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, the Botanical Conservatory, the Center for Plant Diversity, the Anthropology Collections, and the Paleontology Collections.

The Biodiversity Day takes place from noon to 4 p.m. and is an opportunity to see "see carnivorous plants, touch fossils, learn about birds and hold insects," said Tabatha Yang, outreach and education coordinator at the Bohart.

Free and open to the public, it's a family friendly event. See the Bohart for more information and a map.

Insects? Plants? Fossils? Birds? "Bio Day" promises to be educational, informative and entertaining. 

Close-up of one of the bumble bees. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

The three queen bumble bees (Bombus melanopygus) we found buzzing around our porch light the night of Jan. 9 are still very much alive.

Who would have "thunk?"

Native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, is caring for them at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road. 

Thorp, who officially retired in 1994, maintains an active research and bee monitoring/identification program based as the Laidlaw facility. He recently co-authored a book on Bumble Bees of North America: An identification Guide (Princeton University Press), to be released in March.

So yesterday photographer/artist Allan Jones of Davis and I checked out "The Lovely Ladies at the Laidlaw."  Yes, they're very much alive.

But it sure was strange on Jan. 9 to see them as as night fliers, or porch-light bumble bees. I figured they were parasitized. I figured that a florid fly, Apocephalus borealis, which lays its eggs in such insects as bumble bees, wasps and honey bees, had nailed them. I figured they'd be goners within a few days.

I hope I'm wrong.

It's long been known that Apocephalus borealis infests bumble bees.  However, Professor John Hafernik of San Francisco State University and his colleagues caused quite a media stir when they discovered that this fly infests honey bees as well. They published their work, "A New Threat to Honey Bees, the Parasitic Phorid Fly, Apocephalus borealis,"  in PLOS ONE back in January 2012. They revealed that the parasitized, disoriented honey bees  (which they nicknamed "Zombies" or "ZomBees") leave their hives at night and head for the lights.

"After being parasitized by the fly, the bees abandon their hives in what is literally a flight of the living dead to congregate near lights," said Andrew Core of the Hafernik lab.  'When we observed the bees for some time—the ones that were alive—we found that they walked around in circles, often with no sense of direction."

What's next?

Fingers crossed that the three queen bumble bees aren't parasitized. Fingers crossed that they will survive. Fingers crossed that they will continue to be "The Lovely Ladies at the Laidlaw." 

Don't go looking for the first-flight cabbage white butterfly of the year in Yolo, Solano and Sacramento counties.

The beer-for-a-butterfly contest is over.

We have a winner!...drum roll...

Professor Arthur Shapiro!

Shapiro, a distinguished professor in the UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology, again won his own three-county area contest by netting the first-flight cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae) of the year at 12:20 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 14 in West Sacramento, Yolo County.

Shapiro netted a male on the south slope of the railroad tracks where “I’ve caught at least half of the first-flight cabbage whites.” The temperature was 62 degrees, but soon rose to 70 degrees. 

“I caught it in mid-air with a ballet leap!” Shapiro said, smiling.

“There was a little radish but hardly any vegetation there. It was about 40 or 50 feet from where I got the one last year, about one-fourth  mile west of Harbor Boulevard. It was flying eastward along the edge of the service road.”

The annual contest, which Shapiro launched in 1972, seeks the first-flight cabbage white butterfly of the year in the three-county area of Sacramento, Yolo and Solano. He has won every year except for the three years claimed the championship title.

The contest is all part of Shapiro’s 43-year study of climate and butterfly seasonality. “It 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.” 

“The cabbage white is now emerging a week or so earlier on average than it did 30 years ago here,” Shapiro said. He estimated his 2014 find ranks as "the fifth or sixth earliest since 1972."

Shapiro delivered the butterfly to the Evolution and Ecology office, where it was verified by Sherri Mann and Joe Patrocinio. No one else has submitted an entry.

The professor, fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Entomological Society and the California Academy of Sciences,  initially calculated he would find the butterfly either Jan. 17 or 18. “It may have been out Monday (Jan. 13), but I was in Chico delivering a talk to the Northern California Botanists on “What Did Sacramento Valley Butterflies Do Before There Was Yellow Starthistle?” 

While searching for the cabbage white on Tuesday, Shapiro also spotted a small male buckeye butterfly, (Junonia coenia) along the trail, and a mourning cloak (Nymphalis antiopa), perched on and flying around leafless willows. “That’s the fourth earliest antiopa in the valley ever,” he said.  

Shapiro said he will be celebrating his victory by sharing a pitcher of beer with a friend at an undisclosed Davis venue. “It will be PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon) because I get to choose.”

The cabbage white butterfly inhabits vacant lots, fields and gardens where its host plants, weedy mustards, grow. Mustards, however, are late this year, he said, pointing out the drought. “The record for consecutive days without rainfall in the winter here is 44. We’re on the 38th day and I see no chance of rain in sight, so this record will be broken.” However, a "good Pineapple Express," he said, could easily erase the drought.

Now, with the first-flight butterfly caught and in the history/record books, “it is spring because I say so.”

Shapiro maintains a website on butterflies at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu, where he records the population trends he monitors in Central California.  He and biologist/writer/photographer 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.