Saturday, Aug. 17 is National Honey Bee Day and it's time for a tribute, a salute and a cheer, all combined into one: Go, bees!

We're glad to see concerned citizens, organizations and businesses contributing to bee research at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, Department of Entomology and Nematology, University of California, Davis.

This year the department was absolutely delighted to receive a $30,000 donation from the California State Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

State Regent Debra Jamison adopted the motto, “Bees are at the heart of our existence” and vowed to support research to help the beleaguered bees.

 “Every state regent has a fund-raising project; I chose honey bees,” said Jamison, whose first name, Debra, means “bee” in Hebrew. “I have had a lifelong love and respect for bees and I spent a lot of my childhood watching them, attracting them with sugar water, catching and playing with them and even dissecting them during a time when I imagined myself to be a junior scientist.”

“Back in those days, there was an abundance of bees, usually observed by this kid in her family’s backyard full of clover blossoms—something you rarely see any more due to spraying of pre-emergents and other weed killers.”

The funds are earmarked for the lab of bee scientist/assistant professor Brian Johnson.  His graduate student, Gerard Smith, researches the effect of pesticide exposure in the field on honey bee foraging behavior, and graduate student Cameron Jasper studies the genetic basis of division of labor in honey bees.

Then just last week Häagen-Dazs, a strong supporter of bee research, and the name behind the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven at UC Davis, announced it would donate $5 to UC Davis bee research for every download of its Häagen-Dazs Concerto Timer app--up to $75,000.

The way it works, you download the free app at I-Tunes with your I-Phone or I-Pad. You remove your carton of Häagen-Dazs premier ice cream from the freezer and point your I-Phone or I-Pad at the lid. Voila! Two minutes of concerto music, and that's just the right amount of time for your ice cream to soften or temper.

Häagen-Dazs, besides its continuing, generous support of the garden, funded the Häagen-Dazs Postdoctoral Scholar Fellowship to enable virus researcher Michelle Flenniken to study the viruses that plaque honey bees.

Then there's the group of donors that came forth to make the bee garden happen. The garden, located next to the Laidlaw facility on Bee Biology Road, was planted in the fall of 2009 as a year-around food source for the Laidlaw bees and other pollinators, as a way to raise public awareness about the plight of honey bees, and to provide visitors with ideas of what to plant in their own gardens. Donors? You can see their names on the donor page of the Laidlaw facility website. They include the garden designers (Ann F. Baker Donald Sibbett, Jessica Brainard and Chika Kurotaki); landscape contractor Cagwin & Dorward; and Wells Fargo, which funded the bee-utiful bee sculpture in the haven created by Donna Billick of Davis.

Youth worried about the plight of the honey bees came forth to help. Marin County resident Sheridan Miller began supporting bee research at age 11 and continues to do so through various fundraising projects. She's in high school now--and guess what? She's a beekeeper, too.

Periodically, people ask how to donate to UC Davis Bee Research. Just as Häagen-Dazs has an app for that (a concerto timer), the department has a donor page for that. Folks can make their choice(s). This page lists donors who supported the haven at its inception; more names will be added soon. There's also an online donor button on the Laidlaw home page.

Meanwhile, Saturday, Aug. 17 is National Honey Bee Day and a time to make our voices heard. Can't you just hear the queen bees piping?

Go, bees!

Shirley Polykoff (1909-1998), the advertising legend who coined the words "Is it true blondes have more fun?" for a Clairol jingle, raised awareness of blondes, insinuating that "gentlemen prefer blondes."

But when it comes to bees, the most common honey bee in the United States are blondes, also known as Italians or Apis mellifera ligustica. But they have no clue--nor should they--about "fun." Neither do the darker bees, the Carniolans (Apis mellifera carnica) and the Caucasians (Apis mellifera caucasica).

"Fun" is not something attributable to bees. Work is.

On Saturday, Aug. 17, when we celebrate National Honey Bee Day, it's time to think about all the work bees do in gathering pollen, nectar, propolis (plant resin) and water for their colonies. Pollen is their protein; nectar, their carbohydrate.

"Honey bees are the only insects that produce human food," write bee scientists Diana Sammataro and Alphonse Avitabile in the fourth edition of their book,The Beekeeper's Handbook, published by Comstock Publishing Associates, a division of the Cornell University Press.

They list a number of "fun facts" about bees, data gleaned from a number of sources. They include:

• It takes 12 honey bees to make one teaspoon of honey,
• It takes 1-500 flowers to gather a full load, depending on the kind of flower and nectar/pollen production,
• In one trip, a honey bee can visit about 75 flowers and up to 3000 flowers. 
• Bees from the same hive visit about 225,000 flowers a day. 
• On average, a honey bee produces 1/12th teaspoon (5 drops) of honey in her lifetime.
• A bee has to visit about 2 million flowers to collect enough nectar to make one pound of honey.
• The energy in one ounce of honey would provide one bee with enough energy to fly around the world.
• About 50 to 80 percent of foragers collect nectar.
• Fifteen to 30 percent of foragers collect pollen.
• Fifteen percent of foragers collect both pollen and nectar.
• There are 20,000 to 6 million pollen grains on one bee, depending on the flower species.
• One colony can eat 44 to 65 pounds of pollen a year.

Those are just some of the fun facts in this comprehensive, well-written, well-illustrated  book. Sammataro is a research entomologist at the USDA-ARS Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson, Ariz., and Avitabile is a longtime beekeeper and emeritus professor of biology at the University of Connecticut, Waterbury.

It's the kind of book that beekeepers, from beginning to advanced, will dog-ear.

Yellowjacket, Vespula pensylvanica.

As the guests dined on seafood, yellowjackets dined on bits of protein left behind.

The half-filled glasses were there to draw the yellowjackets away from the picnic tables. Don't know what was in the plastic glasses, but whatever it was, it did not kill them. It just slowed them down. A little. They jumped in, swam around, and climbed out.

Yellowjackets (genera Vespula) are pests.

"Defensive behavior increases as the season progresses and colony populations become larger while food becomes scarcer," wrote authors Eric Mussen of Uc Davis and Michael Rust of UC Riverside in the newly updated UC IPM Pest Note, Yellowjackets and Other Social Wasps.

"In fall, foraging yellowjackets are primarily scavengers, and they start to show up at picnics and barbecues, around garbage cans, at dishes of dog or cat food placed outside, and where ripe or overripe fruit are accessible. At certain times and places, the number of scavenger wasps can be quite large."

Yes, indeed. Uninvited guests are likely to join your picnic. 

The ones we observed were Vespula pensylvanica, commonly referred to as "meat bees" because they like meat, including the hamburgers, hot dogs and other protein you serve at  your picnic and at other outdoor outings. They also like sugary drinks.

An excerpt from the Pest Note: 

"Usually stinging behavior is encountered at nesting sites, but sometimes scavenging yellowjackets will sting if someone tries to swat them away from a potential food source. When scavenging at picnics or other outdoor meals, wasps will crawl into soda cans and can sting your lips or the inside of your mouth or throat."

Want to know more about yellowjackets and other social wasps? Access or download the Pest Note.

Gulf Fritillary butterfly laying an egg on a tendril. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

Complete metamorphosis. Complete awe.

In our yard, the Gulf Fritillary butterflies (Agraulis vanillae) are laying eggs on our passionflower vine (Passiflora). They deposit  the eggs on top of the leaves, beneath the leaves, or on the tendrils. 

An egg hatches, and a caterpillar--a very hungry caterpillar--emerges. It eats as if there is no tomorrow, and for some, there IS no tomorrow. Predators, including birds, spiders, praying mantids and European paper wasps, await them.

Humans also kill them with pesticides because the caterpillars do what they're supposed to do--eat the leaves. Skeletonized plants in the garden? Horrors, what would our neighbors say? 

But, if all goes well, and the caterpillars thrive, the next stage is the chrysalis. 

Finally, the adult butterfly emerges from the chrysalis to start the life cycle all over again. 

Sometimes when you look at the tiny yellow Gulf Frit egg, it's difficult to imagine that one day it will become a reddish-orange butterfly fluttering around the garden, sipping nectar from lantana (genus Lantana), Mexican sunflowers (Tithonia) and other plants.

Interested in butterflies? When you get a chance, you should explore Art Shapiro's Butterfly World. Shapiro, a distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, monitors the butterfly population in the Central Valley. He's also written a book, Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley Regions.

And those amazing Gulf Frits? They're making a comeback in the Sacramento area.

And none too soon.